7 ‘Saturday Night Live’ Cast Members We Never Heard From Again
Generally speaking, Saturday Night Live is seen as a way for young comedic talent to launch their careers. While not everyone can become a movie star like Adam Sandler or Bill Murray, many find steady work in entertainment, like Dana Carvey and David Spade now being veteran podcasters or Laraine Newman and Chris Parnell becoming prolific voice actors. But some cast members — like the seven below — never quite found their place after leaving SNL.
Pamela Stephenson
The wife of legendary Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, Stephenson had some impressive credits before joining SNL — e.g., Superman III, Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I and the British sketch show Not the Nine O’Clock News. In 1984, she joined SNL for one season, impersonating Billy Idol and Cyndi Lauper, before departing. After SNL, she enjoyed a handful of TV and film credits before starting a new day job as a psychologist.
A. Whitney Brown
Brown served as a writer on SNL for five seasons and as a featured cast member from 1986 to 1991. His most memorable recurring sketch was as a commentator for Dennis Miller’s “Weekend Update.” After SNL, he became a correspondent for the first two years of The Daily Show in the late 1990s, but that’s about it.
Emily Prager
After acting on the soap opera The Edge of Night and serving as an editor on The National Lampoon, Prager became an SNL writer and briefly a cast member during Season Six. She later wrote one short film, appeared in another and then moved on to become a journalist, writing for The New York Times, The Village Voice and The Guardian.
Yvonne Hudson
Hudson was SNL’s first Black female cast member, having joined the show in its ill-fated sixth season. She appeared in a number of sketches uncredited before getting fired along with nearly everyone else that season. She left the entertainment industry entirely and doesn’t have a public presence.
Peter Aykroyd
While Dan Aykroyd is SNL royalty, his younger brother Peter wasn’t as successful on the show, serving as a cast member for just one season (from 1979 until 1980). Afterward, he only did a couple more showbiz-related things — writing the box-office bomb Nothing But Trouble with Dan and creating a paranormal reality show his brother hosted called PSI Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal. Sadly, he died in 2021.
Tom Schiller
Schiller began as a writer on SNL when the show debuted and eventually became its resident short filmmaker. In fact, “Schiller’s Reel” was a popular segment until the early 1990s. He’s only acted a few times since leaving SNL. Instead, he’s turned his attention to a successful commercial directing career.
Ann Risley
Risley had the misfortune of being cast on what’s often regarded as SNL’s worst season. After Lorne Michaels and all the original cast left the show at the end of Season Five, a new cast was brought in for a short season of only 12 episodes. After which, everyone was fired except for Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo. During her 12 episodes, Risley played First Lady Rosalynn Carter along with a handful of other forgotten characters. Even after her stint on SNL, she only racked up a handful of TV credits before retiring from the business for good in the early 1990s.