Bowen Yang had nothing to do with would-be Saturday Night Live featured player Shane Gillis’ firing, he declared on Instagram.
“Can we acknowledge that Bowen Yang b---hed [Gillis] off the show?” wrote one social media user on Instagram beneath a promo of Gillis’s upcoming episode. “I smell a rat.”
Yang replied to the post, saying that he “didn’t do any of this.”
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SNL hired Gillis, who will host the show for the second time on Saturday, in 2019 but fired him before the season premiered after audio of him using a slur against Chinese people on his podcast resurfaced. The revelation drew attention to Yang, who is Chinese American and was also announced as an incoming featured player that year. Yang told The New Yorker last year that SNL boss Lorne Michaels texted at the time to assure him that he didn’t have to be the “poster child for racial harmony.”
Yang did become a symbol of sorts, however, when users erroneously assumed he had something to do with Michaels’ decision to fire Gillis. According to Vulture, NBC wanted to nix the comedian under pressure from an Asian advocacy group, which led Michaels to make the call.
Yang denied the Instagram user’s claim Thursday that Gillis was “unfairly ditched [because] of a whiny queen,” adding a cheeky note that he “wrote the sketch you were a background actor in,” as the user had appeared as an extra during Emma Stone’s episode in 2019. He added a smiley face emoji for good measure.
Amid the revelations of his offensive remarks, Gillis called Yang to apologize before he was even fired.
“I ended the call by saying, ‘I guess I’ll just see you at work,’” Yang told Variety. “He laughed and said, ‘Sure,’ and hung up. Then they announced that he was fired.”
Michaels has made a point never to lose contact with Gillis, however, and his decision to invite the red state comedian back to host a second time—despite poor reviews of his first appearance—comes after his comments to a biographer insisting that “the show is nonpartisan.”
When Gillis was first asked to host the show in 2024, he and Yang shared a hug during the sendoff at the end of the program, further showing there was no bad blood. Yang told The New Yorker, “I think he and I have done enough things in our careers now to really not [have] that be the definitive beginning or the thing that casts a pall over everything else that we do going forward.”
