Catherine O’Hara Reveals Why She Left ‘Saturday Night Live’ After One Week

Catherine O’Hara has revealed why she quit Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s after one week.

The Argylle actress, who was cast in the sketch comedy show’s sixth season, recently told People magazine that while there have been “BS stories about I was supposedly scared by somebody,” those are not true.

O’Hara was actually already part of the cast of the Canadian comedy sketch show SCTV. But since it wasn’t consistently on the air, she decided to take a job at SNL.

“Our producer would get a deal with a network, and we’d have a show for a season or two, and then that deal would go away. There’d be a break, then we’d do the show again,” she said, adding that during one break, “I got asked to be on Saturday Night Live. And of course I said yes. Who doesn’t want to do that?”

But then the Schitt’s Creek star later learned that SCTV was picked up again, so she left SNL and never got the opportunity to film an episode for the NBC series.

“Basically I said, ‘Oh, sorry, I gotta go be with my [comedy] family,’” she explained, adding that she was “stupid” for not waiting a bit longer for SCTV to return.

“Yeah, not cool to take a job and leave it. You know what I mean?” the Home Alone actress said but believes “it all worked out the way it was supposed to.”

SCTV ran from 1976 to 1984. O’Hara starred alongside Eugene Levy, John Candy, Martin Short, Rick Moranis, Joe Flaherty and Andrea Martin.

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