With its 47th season looming on the very-near horizon, SNL has added three new featured players to its cast. Sarah Sherman, Aristotle Athari, and James Austin Johnson are headed to Studio 8H for the upcoming season premiere on October 2, where they will join first-time host Owen Wilson in being totally new to the show. They’ll also be joining returning featured players Andrew Dismukes and Punkie Johnson, while Chloe Fineman and Bowen “Iceberg†Yang have been promoted to repertory players.
Sarah Sherman, better known online as Sarah Squirm, was featured on our 2018 list of Comedians You Should and Will Know. Her 2018 Adult Swim infomercial will haunt your dreams, and her more recent short for Means TV, The Sarah Vaccine, will have you praying for the SNL props department.
Aristotle Athari might look familiar to Silicon Valley fans, having portrayed the infamous chair-pants-wearing programmer Gabe in season six. But Gabe is just one of many characters Athari has brought to life. He’s also a member of Hasan Minaj’s sketch group Goatface, whose one-hour special aired on Comedy Central in 2018. To truly get a sense of his range, though, you’ll want to check out his 2021 Just for Laughs New Faces: Characters set below.
James Austin Johnson is a man with three names and many faces. You probably recognize him from his casual but very good Trump impressions, but Johnson is a talented impressionist overall, so we expect to see plenty of him in the show’s topical cold opens. He also created a documentary about himself moving to Austin earlier this year, a thing he did not actually do.
Along with the additions come some subtractions. Beck Bennett, who joined the show as a featured player for season 39 in 2013, is not returning for season 47, though his Good Neighbor collaborator Kyle Mooney is sticking around. Lauren Holt, who joined the show at the start of season 46 as a featured player, will also not be returning. At 21 cast members total, this is set to be an even bigger cast than the very big (20-person!) cast we got last year, but you can never have too much help figuring out what to do with Kim Kardashian West.
Here’s the full cast lineup for season 47:
Repertory Players:
Aidy Bryant
Michael Che
Pete Davidson
Mikey Day
Chloe Fineman
Heidi Gardner
Colin Jost
Kate McKinnon
Alex Moffat
Kyle Mooney
Ego Nwodim
Chris Redd
Cecily Strong
Kenan Thompson
Melissa Villaseñor
Bowen Yang
Featured Players:
Aristotle Athari
Andrew Dismukes
James Austin Johnson
Punkie Johnson
Sarah Sherman