Friday, March 29, 2024

Leslie Jones Admits ‘I Wasn’t Very Free’ at SNL, Does Not Regret Leaving Show

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*Leslie Jones has opened up about her departure from “Saturday Night Live,” and she had made clear that she does not miss the sketch comedy show “at all.”

“I don’t miss it. At all,” she said in a new interview with Entertainment Tonight.

“That job was hard, man,” Jones added “That job was like two jobs and very restrictive too. I wasn’t very free there.”

Jones first joined the NBC series in 2014 as a writer before being bumped up to a prominent cast member position. She earned three Emmy nominations during her five seasons. The comedian tells ET that she only misses her fromer SNL co-star, Kenan Thompson.

Last fall Jones announced she wouldn’t be returning for SNL’s 45th season. 

READ MORE: Leslie Jones: Comedian Not Returning to ‘SNL’ for Season 45


Jones dished with PEOPLE about leaving SNL for a new venture, hosting the reboot of “Supermarket Sweep,” which airs Sundays on ABC.

“This one was really special because I wanted to give money to regular people,” she said. “If you give somebody $100,00, that’s the biggest ‘God bless you’ you could ever give to somebody. I want people to see that it’s possible to still win.”

“The game play in sweep has always been the strongest part of the show,” Jones continued. “Now I am bringing a little bit of me and joy and fun and joking and messing with the contestants. It’s just wonderful. You get to see their real personality when they pull up to the sweep, you’re like, ‘Oh, this is what you’re about. Oh, okay. I like this.’”

Jones says everybody’s a winner on the game show. “If they don’t win the big money, they get to take home the total of the cart. So there’s no losing.”

As a longtime fan of the competiton series, Jones once auditioned to be a contestant, telling ET: “I trained my roommate. I made her watch the show. I took her to the grocery stores. I made her run up and down the aisle. Like, we trained,” she says.

So when their big gameplay day arrived, Jones says “We were the last four teams and they were bringing people in to compete against each other, but you had to stay for that part,” she recalls, but as it turns out, they couldn’t complete the competition because Jones’ roomate had to bail to go to work

“She was like, ‘I gotta go.’ And I lost my ever-living mind,” Jones says. “I don’t think they were ever gonna let me on that lot again ‘cause I called her every type of name I could come up with. I was like, ‘I’ll never talk to you.’ Then I was like, ‘I’m not riding home with you.’”

“Supermarket Sweep” airs Sundays ET/PT on ABC.

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