Kenan Thompson is just as puzzled as anyone about why Morgan Wallen rushed off the Saturday Night Live stage at the end of the last episode, only saying goodbye to host Mikey Madison.
“I don’t know what goes through people’s minds when they decide to do stuff like that. I don’t know if he understood the assignment or not, or if he was really feeling a certain kind of way,” Thompson tells Entertainment Weekly while speaking about his new GERD Is No Joke campaign with Phathom Pharmaceuticals to raise awareness about the condition and treatment options such as Voquezna.
The longest-tenured SNL cast member confirms he “definitely saw it” when the musical guest prematurely departed. “You see somebody before you get a chance to say hi or say good job or anything like that, they just dipping,” he recalls. “I thought maybe he had to go to the potty or something.”
Morgan’s exit came just as the credits started to roll for viewers at home, during a moment when fans are used to seeing guests and cast members interacting on stage.
“It’s definitely a spike in the norm,” Thompson says. “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 says he “never met” Wallen during the most recent episode or back when the country star first performed as musical guest in December 2020, which came after an earlier SNL debut was canceled due to Wallen breaking COVID-19 protocols.
“Seems like a complicated individual, I guess,” Thompson reflects, noting that it’s not the first time a musical guest has suddenly left.
“Prince did the same thing,” he says, clarifying, “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.'”
He continues, “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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Morgan Wallen walks of f the ‘Saturday Night Live’ stage. NBC
Later that night, the musician posted a photo of a private jet with the caption “Get me to God’s country” on his Instagram Stories, which Thompson admits he didn’t appreciate.
“The ‘God’s country’ of it all is strange because it’s like, what are you trying to say? You trying to say that we are not in God’s country? We’re not all in God’s country? We’re not all under God’s umbrella? That’s not necessarily my favorite,” Thompson says. “But whatever. Moving on, we got a new show. We got Jack Black this week. We’re here talking about GERD. We will be fine.”
Learn more about Thompson’s GERD Is No Joke campaign here.
Saturday Night Live airs Saturdays at 11:30 p.m. ET/8:30 p.m. PT on NBC and Peacock.
