SNL Season 52 Cast: Who Left, Who Joined, and the First Four Hosts
- Seventeen performers: ten repertory players and seven featured players. The full list is below, with what changed for each one.
- 🔴 Most cast lists you will find are out of date, including NBC’s own Season 52 page. The lineup was settled by an announcement on 16 September; NBC’s page is dated 11 August and still shows the older version.
- Two left. Chloe Fineman announced her departure in July 2026 after seven seasons, and Bowen Yang went mid-season, during the 20 December Christmas episode.
- Two joined, both as featured players: Saidah Belo-Osagie and Grace Reiter. Reiter was born on 18 May 2001, which is reported as making her the first SNL cast member born in the 21st century.
- Two were promoted in the same announcement. Ashley Padilla and Jane Wickline both arrived in Season 50 and both move up to repertory.
- A writer left too, and it matters more than most writer exits: Martin Herlihy, the second of Please Don’t Destroy’s three members to leave.
- The premiere is Saturday 26 September, 11:30pm ET on NBC. Four hosts are announced; two October Saturdays are still blank.
Saturday Night Live returns on Saturday 26 September 2026 with seventeen performers, two of whom have never been on the show before.
If you have already looked this up somewhere else, there is a decent chance you were given the wrong list. The lineup was not settled until 16 September, and a lot of what is published about Season 52 — including NBC’s own page about it — was written before that.
Who is in the SNL Season 52 cast?
Ten repertory players and seven featured players.
Repertory players
| Name | Status |
|---|---|
| Michael Che | Returning — Weekend Update anchor |
| Mikey Day | Returning |
| Andrew Dismukes | Returning |
| Marcello Hernández | Returning |
| James Austin Johnson | Returning |
| Colin Jost | Returning — Weekend Update anchor |
| Ashley Padilla | Promoted, joined in Season 50 |
| Sarah Sherman | Returning |
| Kenan Thompson | Returning |
| Jane Wickline | Promoted, joined in Season 50 |
Featured players
| Name | Status |
|---|---|
| Saidah Belo-Osagie | New, announced 16 September |
| Tommy Brennan | Joined in Season 51 |
| Jeremy Culhane | Joined in Season 51 |
| Ben Marshall | Joined in Season 51 |
| Kam Patterson | Joined in Season 51 |
| Grace Reiter | New, announced 16 September |
| Veronika Slowikowska | Joined in Season 51 |
Weekend Update is unchanged: Michael Che and Colin Jost, as they have been for a decade.
Why do the cast lists disagree?
Because almost all of them were written before 16 September.
This is worth understanding before you trust any version of the list, including this one. Everything about Season 52’s cast was announced in stages across the summer, and the stage that actually settled it came late:
- July 2026 — Chloe Fineman announces she is leaving.
- 19 August 2026 — talent showcases begin, where performers audition for the show.
- 9 September 2026 — writer Martin Herlihy’s departure is announced.
- 16 September 2026 — the hires and the promotions are announced together. This is the one that matters.
NBC’s own Season 52 explainer is dated 11 August. It is a perfectly good page, and it was published five weeks before the cast was finalised, so it lists Padilla and Wickline as featured players and does not name the two new hires as cast members at all. A trade listing does the same.
🔴 The test is simple: if a Season 52 cast list has Ashley Padilla or Jane Wickline in the featured players, it predates 16 September.
Who left SNL before Season 52?
Two performers and one writer, and only one of the three left at the end of a season.
Chloe Fineman
Announced July 2026, after seven seasons. Fineman joined in 2019 and leaves as the cast’s most reliable impressionist. Her statement said that “working at SNL has been the greatest privilege of my life”, with thanks to the cast, the crew and Lorne Michaels.
Bowen Yang
Left mid-season, during the Christmas episode on 20 December. That was Ariana Grande’s episode, in Season 51 — so by the time Season 52 begins, the cast has already had most of a season without him.
Martin Herlihy
Announced 9 September 2026, after five seasons as a writer since 2021.
A writer leaving does not usually belong in a cast article. This one does, because Herlihy is a member of Please Don’t Destroy, the sketch trio whose digital shorts have been a fixture of the show — and he is the second of the three to go, after John Higgins left before Season 51. Two thirds of a recurring act is a visible change even though none of it happens on the cast list.
Who are the new SNL cast members?
Two featured players, announced on 16 September.
Saidah Belo-Osagie
A Nigerian American comedian and filmmaker from Queens, now based in Brooklyn. She grew up in Elmont, New York, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants of Edo heritage, and studied philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 2018.
Her route in was not the stand-up circuit. She started on the production side — a development internship at Tribeca Productions working on When They See Us, then assistant roles at the Gotham Film & Media Institute and on For Life and Kaleidoscope. Her own work includes the short film Tinge, which she wrote and directed in 2020, the event series Afrobeats Futura, and a solo show, Saidah Gets Closure.
Grace Reiter
Born 18 May 2001 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, which is reported as making her the first SNL cast member born in the 21st century.
Reiter came up entirely online. She began posting point-of-view sketches on TikTok in 2019 and has built an audience of about 3.9 million followers there, with a further 702,000 subscribers on YouTube. In late 2022 she joined the core cast of American High, the Syracuse-based studio, making daily short-form sketches. She also appears in the HBO series The Chair Company.
She was one of the standouts from the 19 August talent showcases, which is how SNL has always found people. Two other names from those showcases did not get the call: Los Espookys co-creator Ana Fabrega, and the comedy rock trio Wolves of Glendale.
Who was promoted?
Ashley Padilla and Jane Wickline, both to repertory, in the same 16 September announcement.
Both arrived in Season 50, in 2024, so this is the standard two-season path from featured to repertory. Wickline is now going into her third season on the show and her first as a full cast member.
The five performers who joined in Season 51 — Tommy Brennan, Jeremy Culhane, Ben Marshall, Kam Patterson and Veronika Slowikowska — all stay as featured players, which is normal after a single season.
When does SNL Season 52 premiere, and how do you watch it?
| Premiere | Saturday 26 September 2026 |
| Channel | NBC |
| Time | 11:30pm ET / 10:30pm CT / 8:30pm PT |
| Live stream | Peacock, simulcast — see the note below |
| Next day | Peacock, Sunday morning |
| Studio | Studio 8H, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York |
Those three times are the same moment, not three showings. SNL runs live coast to coast, so the West Coast gets it live at 8:30pm rather than on a three-hour delay. NBC lists all three together for that reason.
⚠️ The Peacock part has a catch NBC does not mention. NBC’s pages say the show is “simulcast live on Peacock” and stop there. Coverage of Peacock’s plans is more specific: the live NBC feed sits in the more expensive Premium Plus tier, reported at $19.99 a month, while the cheaper ad-supported Premium tier at $12.99 gets the episode the next morning instead of as it airs. If you are subscribing specifically to watch SNL live, that distinction is the whole decision. Those prices are from that coverage, not from Peacock itself.
Tickets are a lottery. The show is taped in front of a studio audience at Studio 8H, and the annual ticket lottery runs each August, with standby tickets available through the season.
If you are working out the autumn network schedule more broadly, our DWTS Season 35 cast and channel guide covers the other big live-format show currently running.
Who is hosting SNL Season 52?
Four have been announced.
| Date | Host | Musical guest |
|---|---|---|
| 26 September | Jalen Brunson | KATSEYE |
| 3 October | Dakota Johnson | Turnstile |
| 10 October | Shane Gillis | Rosalía |
| 31 October | Inde Navarrette | Gracie Abrams |
Jalen Brunson is a first-time host, and the booking is a victory lap: he was named MVP after leading the New York Knicks to their first championship in 53 years. KATSEYE released their third EP, WILD, on 14 August and are on a sold-out tour.
Dakota Johnson and Shane Gillis are both on their third time hosting. Inde Navarrette is a first-timer, and she gets the Halloween show. Rosalía and Gracie Abrams are each on their second appearance as musical guest.
What about 17 and 24 October?
Nothing has been announced for those two Saturdays.
That is an absence in the announcements rather than a published schedule. SNL routinely announces hosts in small batches through the autumn, and nothing that has been published says the show is dark on those nights.
The bottom line
The cast is seventeen, the changes are five, and the date that matters is 16 September — the day the departures, the hires and the promotions all resolved into one list.
If you take one thing from this page, take the test: a Season 52 cast list with Padilla and Wickline in the featured players was written before the cast was finished.
How we verified this
🔴 The single most useful fact here is a date, and it explains why every list disagrees. The Season 52 lineup was settled by an announcement on 16 September 2026, reported the same day by Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline and the AV Club. NBC’s own “everything to know about Season 52” page carries a byline date of 11 August 2026 — five weeks earlier — and still lists Ashley Padilla and Jane Wickline among the featured players. At least one television trade listing does the same. Neither is wrong so much as stale, and this page states the 16 September version.
✅ The promotion has a second, independent confirmation. Beyond the 16 September reports, Jane Wickline’s own reference entry describes Season 52 as her first as a repertory player. That is a different document making the same claim for a different reason, which is what a real cross-check looks like.
⚠️ One credit in circulation is deliberately left out. A summary of trade coverage described Grace Reiter as having directed the HBO series The Chair Company. Her own reference entry says she stars in it. Directing and starring are not the same credit and only one of them is sourced, so this page uses the sourced one and drops the other rather than splitting the difference.
⚠️ “First cast member born in the 21st century” is reported, and only partly checked here. Reiter’s date of birth is 18 May 2001. The most plausible challenger on the current cast, Jane Wickline, was born 1 July 1999 — checked, and it does not displace the claim. Every cast member in the show’s fifty-one previous seasons was not checked, so the line is attributed rather than asserted as a verified first.
⚠️ Which Peacock plan you need is not something NBC answers, and the answer here is attributed. NBC’s own pages say the show is “simulcast live on Peacock” and do not name a tier. Coverage of Peacock’s plans places the live NBC feed in the more expensive Premium Plus tier, with the cheaper ad-supported tier getting the episode the next morning. Peacock’s own site refused our requests, so the prices below come from that coverage rather than from Peacock, and are labelled as such.
✅ The three broadcast times are one instant, not three showings. 11:30 ET, 10:30 Central and 8:30 Pacific are the same moment — this is the live coast-to-coast broadcast the show has run for years, and NBC states all three together. Mountain time is not in NBC’s wording and is not invented here.
⚠️ The two blank October Saturdays are an absence in the announcements, not a schedule. 17 and 24 October have no host announced. Nothing published says the show is dark on those nights, and this page does not say so either.