Maybe “God’s Country” is a euphemism?
“I thought maybe he had to go to the potty or something,” SNL‘s Kenan Thompson tells Entertainment Weekly about last Saturday’s musical guest Morgan Wallen, who didn’t stick around for the usual cast hugs and chats after the episode. After giving a quick and tepid hug to guest host Mikey Madison, Wallen conspicuously bolted from the front of the stage and walked past the camera.
Later that night, the country star posted on Instagram a photo of a private jet and the message “Get me to God’s country.”
“I don’t know what goes through people’s minds when they decide to do stuff like that,” Thompson says. “I don’t know if he understood the assignment or not, or if he was really feeling a certain kind of way.”
Thompson tells EW that he “definitely saw” the quick exit. “You see somebody before you get a chance to say hi or say good job or anything like that, they just dipping,” he recalls.
“It’s definitely a spike in the norm,” Thompson tells the magazine. “We’re so used to everybody just turning around and high-fiving us, everybody’s saying, ‘Good job, good job, good job.’ So when there’s a departure from that, it’s like, hmm, I wonder what that’s about?”
Thompson adds that he “never met” Wallen during the most recent episode or back when the musician first performed as musical guest in December 2020 (a previous appearance was canceled by the show after to Wallen was photographed partying without a mask during the Covid pandemic).
“Seems like a complicated individual, I guess,” Thompson says in the interview, adding, “Prince did the same thing. I’m not saying Morgan Wallen is Prince, but we weren’t surprised because Prince was notoriously kind of standoffish. It’s just how he was. So we just thought like, ‘Okay, now he’s gone back into fantasyland.’”
“But Saturday I guess it was just different because it just felt so abrupt. And it was already such a small grouping on the stage anyway. So it was just like, oh wow, that was pretty visible. You know what I’m saying? It was a pretty visible thing.”
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