Saturday Night Live is welcoming in three new members of its cast for the show’s landmark 50th season.
Ashley Padilla, Emil Wakim and Jane Wickline have joined the NBC late night show as featured players for 2024-25. The season will premiere Sept. 28 with most of last season’s ensemble intact, although Punkie Johnson and Molly Kearney announced their departures from the show over the summer. Chloe Troast, a featured player last season, is also departing.
“Unfortunately I was not asked back to SNL this season,” Troast wrote in an Instagram Story on Monday evening. “I wish I was going back to be with all the amazing friends I made there, it truly felt like home. But it wasn’t in the cards.”
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Most of the show’s remaining veterans, however, are expected to be back for season 50, with Marcello Hernandez, Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker making the jump from featured players to the main cast. Former castmember Maya Rudolph is also set to play Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, in the run-up to the election. Rudolph played Harris several times during the 2020 campaign and the months after Joe Biden and Harris took office.
In addition to SNL’s regular episodes in the coming season, the show will celebrate its 50 years on the air with a three-hour, primetime special on Feb. 16, 2025. (The actual 50th anniversary of the first show falls on Oct. 11, 2025.) Additionally — and not directly related to the show — Jason Reitman’s feature film Saturday Night, which dramatizes the run-up to the series premiere, debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival and will roll out theatrically beginning in late September.
Padilla has been a member of L.A.’s Groundlings main company since 2021 and has had guest roles on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Night Court. Wakim has performed stand-up on The Tonight Show and the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival, where he was named a “New Face of Comedy” in 2022; he’s also opened for comics Roy Wood Jr., Nikki Glaser and Hasan Minhaj. Wickline is part of the ensemble for Stapleview, a sketch show that’s gained a sizable TikTok following.
