Vanessa Bayer lied to family about joining “SNL” due to 'horror stories' of cast blabbing too early

Some things are more important than family. For Vanessa Bayer, that includes keeping the news that she was cast on Saturday Night Live a secret.

The former SNL star revealed she actually lied to her family about her life-changing career milestone because she heard "horror stories" of other cast members blabbing too early. She did, however, tell her parents — but made them swear to secrecy and, as a result, forced them to lie to other family members too.

"What was so crazy was I was so excited, and they said, 'Please don't tell anyone because we're going to make an official announcement about it,'" Bayer said on Wednesday's episode of the Where Everybody Knows Your Name with Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson (sometimes) podcast. "Like, 'We'll let the press know soon,' or whatever... Some blog picked it up and and and broke the news, and we still had to deny it."

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Bayer remembered how she had to move from Chicago to New York City for the job, but still couldn't tell anyone the reason why. "It was getting to the point where, like, I told my parents — I swore them to secrecy because I had heard horror stories about cast members telling people too early," she added. "Nothing horrible had ever happened, but I was so warned. My agent in Chicago was like, 'You cannot tell a soul.'"

After the news leaked but the official announcement still hadn't come out, it got harder and harder to keep the so-called "secret" from everyone. "I had family members calling my parents being like, 'It's really in a lot of the trades that she's hired,'" Bayer said. "And I'm living in New York in this time, and my parents have to be like, 'Well, you know, that's the trades.' Because I was like, 'You cannot tell anyone.' It was crazy. Just a month of lying to everyone close to me."

Bayer can now look back on that time and laugh, but remembered how difficult it was in the moment. "It was such good news that I was like, 'People are going to want to talk about it, so you just can't tell anyone,'" she said. "So I think I told my best friend, Gwen, and my brother and my parents, and that was it."

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Bayer joined the NBC sketch comedy series as a featured player in season 36 in 2010, and was promoted to the repertory cast two seasons later. She became an instant fan-favorite thanks to her impeccable impersonations of Miley Cyrus and Rachel from Friends, and went on to create original characters Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy, child actor Laura Parsons, J-Pop America Fun Time Now cohost Rebecca Stern-Markowicz, and Brecky, a former porn star hawking luxury items, whose names she and sketch costar Cecily Strong often botch.

Bayer was nominated for an Emmy for her work on the series in 2017 (but lost to her costar Kate McKinnon), and left that same year after seven seasons on the show. At the time, Bayer recalled "just crying" as she looked at a photo from her final episode of her castmates lifting her up in the air. "[There was] just so much love in that room," she previously said. "These are my people."

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