‘SNL’ took a ‘heavy toll’

Andy Samberg details his exit from ‘Saturday Night Live’ more than a decade later.

The star actor of the sketch comedy series joined the show’s cast in 2005. He left the show in 2012 after seven years. Although Samberg admitted that his departure was “a big choice,” he could “no longer take it” due to his grueling schedule.

“My life was falling apart,” he said on Kevin Hart’s Peacock talk show, “Hart to Heart” (via The Hollywood Reporter ). “Physically, it was taking a toll on me, and I got to the point where I hadn’t slept in seven years, basically. We were writing stuff for the show live on Tuesday nights all night, script reading on Wednesdays, and then they’d say, ‘Now create a digital short,’ so write all Thursday, all night Thursday, don’t sleep, get up, shoot on Friday, edit all night Friday and into Saturday. So it’s like I didn’t sleep four days a week, for seven years. So I kind of physically fell apart.”

Samberg added that after his “SNL” co-stars Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone also left the show, he reprised their roles for the viral Lonely Island shorts.

“I was tasked with making the shorts… I never pretended I could do without them,” he said. “We’ve done some stuff I’m really proud of in the last couple of years, but there’s something about the songs that I can only do with Akiva and Jorm. That’s just the way it is, we’re just a band in that sense.”

Samberg, Schaffer, Taccone and Seth Meyers, another SNL alum, now co-host the podcast “The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast.” Samberg shared that he also turned to other former SNL cast members for advice before leaving the show.

“I talked to (Amy) Poehler and some other people who had already left. I thought, once I get there, if I have an idea, I won’t be able to do it,” he said. “The crazy thing about this job is that once you get into it, if you’re just in the shower and you have an idea, that idea can be on TV in three days, which is the most intoxicating feeling.”

Samberg added that “SNL” executives asked him to extend his contract beyond 2012.

“They told me straight out, ‘We’d rather you stay,’ and I said, ‘Oh, that makes it harder.’ But I figured if I was going to get some mental and physical health back, I had to do it,” he said. “So I did it, and it was a very difficult choice. It was hard. I didn’t like leaving.”