Leslie Jones says Saturday Night Live made her a "caricature of myself"

Leslie Jones isn’t harboring any nostalgia for her time in Studio 8H. Despite spending five seasons making jokes and occasionally gagging on fake blood every Saturday night, Jones—who recently hosted ABC’s Supermarket Sweep reboot—said in 2020 that she doesn’t miss her time on Saturday Night Live “at all.” “That job was like two jobs and very restrictive too. I wasn’t very free there,” she said, although she neglected to elaborate on exactly how constricted she felt in that particular interview.

In her new memoir Leslie F*cking Jones, however, the comedian isn’t holding back. In an interview with NPR to promote the book—out this week—Jones had some choice words for how her identity and the identities of her fellow cast mates were treated by the show.

“SNL, they take that one [trope] and they wring it. They wring it because that’s the machine. So whatever it is that I’m giving that they’re so happy about, they feel like it’s got to be that all the time or something like that. So it was like a caricature of myself,” she said. “Either I’m trying to love on the white boys or beat up on the white boys, or I’m doing something loud.”

While these character beats certainly speak to the show’s questionable history with Black performers—Jones, who left the show in 2019, is one of only eight Black women featured in all 48 seasons—the comic asserts that this hemming in applied to all cast members regardless of their race. “I was talking to another cast member that retired and they said ‘But in fairness, that’s how they do all of them. Not just the Black ones,’” she said, suggesting that this certainly happened to Taran Killam, who suddenly left the show (along with Jay Pharoah) ahead of its 42nd season. “Taran wanted to do so much other stuff, but they would only have Taran in those very masculine [roles] and singing and stuff and I said, ‘Oh! This is a machine.’” (Pharoah has also echoed Jones’ sentiments about being boxed in.)

Still, Jones tempered her statements by expressing her “love” for Lorne Michaels. “In his defense, I used to always be like, ‘He’s a puppet master. So he has to make the cast happy, he has to make the writers happy. He has to make the WGA happy. He has to make NBC happy. Then he has to make a family in Omaha, Nebraska, who’s watching the show happy,’” she said. “Imagine the strings that have to go out to him? So it’s a machine that has to work, you know?”