Cheri Oteri Explains Why She Left ‘SNL’

Cheri Oteri may have left Saturday Night Live, but she never quit. 

Her last episode was the Season 25 season finale, which coincided with the end of her initial five-year contract. “I wanted to end on a high and not a low. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made,” Oteri told Entertainment Weekly. “I thought, I can’t quit. I’m not a quitter. Then my agent at the time said, ‘It’s not about you quitting, it's do you want to renew your contract?’”

Oteri, ground down by the exhausting SNL schedule, chose not to renew. “I think I could have stayed there for 10 years if it wasn’t so hard,” she explained about a decision that was “a part of taking care of myself.”

While Saturday Night Live is lauded as a launching pad for future comedy greatness — she began the show at the same time as Will Ferrell — Oteri didn’t have the post-SNL career many expected. She claims she was only offered “big, broad characters” that lacked depth, extensions of the over-the-top crazies that won her SNL fame. 

The most popular was probably Arianna, one half of the spirited Spartan cheerleaders alongside her old Groundlings costar, Ferrell. Despite Ferrell swinging her around like a rag doll over the course of the characters’ 17 sketches, Oteri says she was only injured once.

Craig and Arianna were cheering on the athletes at a high school swim meet — uninvited, of course — and water was thrown onto the stage to simulate a diver jumping into the pool. The splash “knocked my contacts right outta my eye. I couldn’t see the cue cards,” she said. “We wrote it so we knew it, but you change things in between dress and air, some dialogue, so I was completely dependent on it.”

“I was like, ‘Okay, time to get Lasik eye surgery.’”

During a time when SNL characters who didn’t even speak (Ferrell and Chris Kattan’s Night at the Roxbury doofuses) were getting their own feature films, could a Cheerleaders movie have been the big break Oteri needed to get to the next level?

“To be honest, it was so hard during the whole season that when we had our summers off, I just couldn’t imagine writing the whole summer,” she confessed. “I really felt like I needed that time to recharge and just experience life. I think I probably should have, but I was exhausted.” (One other factor: Since SNL ran the initially funny concept into the ground with 17 appearances over four seasons, Oteri and Ferrell may have wrung all the jokes out of the premise.) 

Missing out on an SNL movie doesn’t bother Oteri. “It was everything I ever wanted to do,” she told EW. “I got to live my dream. I have no regrets whatsoever. I just feel nothing but gratitude.”