Leslie Jones spent five years on Saturday Night Live, lending the series some much-needed energy, charisma, and moments of making Colin Jost profoundly uncomfortable. Does Jones—who released a stand-up special, Time Machine, at the start of 2020, and is gearing up to host the Supermarket Sweep revival for ABC—miss her tenure on the periodically celebrated sketch show, which ended back in 2019?
Absolutely not, apparently. Jones gave an interview to Entertainment Tonight’s Kevin Frazier last night, in which she revealed she has zero regrets, period, on bailing on that particular gig: “I don’t miss it. At all,” she said, noting that “That job was like two jobs and very restrictive too. I wasn’t very free there.”
Jones didn’t go into detail about what “restrictive” or “free” mean in this particular sense—whether it relates to her ability to express herself while she was a member of the show’s cast, or if it refers more to what it did to her ability to pick projects for herself. Either way, she’s pretty clearly happy to be out of that particular stress factory, and into a gig where she can call the shots and also get to be part of Supermarket Sweep, the dream of all sentient beings who have ever watched an episode of Supermarket Sweep.
All that being said, there is at least one element of being on Saturday Night Live that Jones does miss: “I miss Kenan,” she noted. (Awwwww.)