Ego Nwodim: The Upside of Making SNL While Losing Our Minds in Quarantine

Ego Nwodim during the "Makeup Tutorial" sketch on Saturday, April 11, 2020 Credit - NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images

A few days before lockdown in March 2020, I celebrated my birthday. Before getting cast on SNL in fall 2018, I had come up as a comedian in the Los Angeles comedy scene, so by early 2020, I still didn’t feel quite like a New Yorker. After my birthday dinner, thrown by Heidi Gardner and attended by other SNL-ers, I was walking back to my studio apartment in Midtown, and as I got closer to my place, I looked up and saw the New Yorker sign in red lights shining in the city skyline. I sighed "Ah, yes. How symbolic. I think I may officially be a New Yorker."

It didn’t even take 48 hours for that little bubble to burst. Days later, I’m hunkered down in my studio apartment, way too close to Port Authority. For anyone who knows New York City geography, it’s not the most ideal place to be on a regular day, let alone during the height of a pandemic. For anyone who knows New York City geography and knows me personally, I’m still upset you didn’t give me a heads up before I signed my lease.

After two weeks in lockdown, which happened to coincide with our previously scheduled hiatus, it was unclear how, if, or when we’d be returning to work for new episodes of SNL. I’m not sure who made the call, but since we couldn’t be together in the studio, we were notified that we’d be producing the sketches from home. Talk about unprecedented times. Neither I, nor my castmates, really understood what this meant or how it would look, but we rose to the occasion. We figured out rather quickly that at-home episodes were exactly what they sounded like. They wouldn’t be live episodes but we’d be shooting sketches on our personal electronic devices and directed via Zoom. This ultimately meant there was no Monday night pitch meeting, no writing night, no table read, no blocking, at least not for those first two at-home episodes. (I think we had a table read for our final at-home episode and I remember this because, somewhere out there, there exists a very sweet screenshot of the full cast on Zoom from that day.)

Throughout these episodes, we were our own lighting operators and camera operators. Thank God for our brilliant editors who were able to make something of the crappy videos we shot in our homes. I’d always known they were amazing and such an integral part of what we do at SNL, but it was in producing these at-home episodes that I came to fully understand just how invaluable their work is to make us look good and to making comedy that isn’t a pain to look at. Same goes for the in-studio crew. It was during these episodes that I fully grasped just how much our crew does to make our jobs easier and make SNL run like a well-oiled machine. The crew on set is that magical oil. One day I’ll tell of the daily meltdowns I had in that studio apartment while trying to break down the giant green screen the show had sent for us to use. Those meltdowns were probably about something else, but I like to blame the green screen.

One of my favorite sketches from that time didn’t involve my green screen nemesis and wasn’t even something I’d intended to be on the show. It's now called “Quarantine Cutie,” but it was originally just a several-frame Instagram Story I had done, as a comfort to myself, on the second or third day of lockdown. In it, I was drawing on my face with washable (don’t worry, folks) Crayola marker and doing an influencer-style beauty tutorial as a woman who, due to the circumstances of the pandemic (i.e. quarantine, supply shortages), has run out of any bit of sanity she may have had—and also all her makeup. And, friends, that's why the orientation of that video is wrong for TV, because it wasn't made for TV. It was shot in portrait because it was shot in Instagram by and for a woman who was losing her mind in quarantine and had fully let the sillies take the wheel.

I don't put a lot of content on social media. I'm not typically one who tries out characters there. I simply took a shower and thought, “Be stupid.” I also didn’t know if I’d ever see anyone IRL (in real life) again so what did it really matter? I wasn't thinking any profound thoughts. I was just having an experience. As much as my cast mates and I attempted to entertain during the pandemic, we were still just people having an experience during this scary, “unprecedented” time.

We've had people say they're so grateful we were willing to show up in that way. People say those episodes weren't great (fair!), but they appreciated having the show go on. In those moments, you realize how much people do look to SNL for some semblance of comfort, even if it's not always comedy. By simply doing the episodes, we made people feel less alone and like maybe, just maybe, things would be OK. Maybe we could take a beat to try to find joy and remember laughter, and bring levity to a very heavy time.—As told to Olivia B. Waxman

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