'Saturday Night Live' Cast: Fred Armisen Confirms Exit, Kristen Wiig Admits Sadness Over Leaving & More [VIDEO]
Saturday Night Live cast member Fred Armisen officially confirmed Friday that he would not be returning to the show in the fall.
"I think it's clear," Armisen confirmed to Splitsider, when asked if he was returning. "I didn't do any kind of official announcement, but I really felt like it was obvious."
In his last sketch in the season finale, Armisen portrayed punk rock musician Ian Rubbish and sang a song straight through without playing for laughs.
Armisen called it "an ending that was a love letter to all the music I grew up with, and also to my friends and to SNL and to Lorne [Michaels] and to the cast. There was a lot of emotion attached to it, but it was a very positive emotion."
Armisen admitted that he'll miss Saturday Night Live for the memories he made: "My biggest memories of SNL, the ones that really stand out in my mind immediately are just writing with people, and being in an office laughing really, really hard."
He added that he's fortunate to be able to continue the writing process on his own sketch comedy show, Portlandia.
Watch a clip of Armisen's (and Bill Hader's) final sketch here:
Similarly, Kristen Wiig, who left SNL in 2012 admitted that she misses the show dearly. "When I was on SNL, Saturday night was my favorite night," she told Harper's Bazaar recently. "Now that I'm not on the show, it makes me sad . . . it is really hard to watch. Because I know that when the sketch is over, everyone is running around, changing costumes, and at like 2 A.M., everyone's hanging out at the party. It's been one of the hardest things to let go of, it really has."
The comedienne made appearances in this year's revival of Arrested Development and is set to star in the sequel to Anchorman, out later this year.
In other SNL news, Utah's Mormon-run TV station KSL (an NBC affiliate) is planning to air the sketch show in the fall when it returns for season 39. The network said they never had a problem with the content of the show; rather, they never aired it because it interfered with a local sports talk show.
