SNL Bids Farewell to Chloe Troast, Adds New Cast Members Ashley Padilla, Emil Wakim, and Jane Wickline

Ahead of Saturday Night Live’s 50th season premiering on September 28, the cast is getting a bit of a shake-up. Ashley Padilla, Emil Wakim, and Jane Wickline are joining the long-running sketch comedy show as featured players. Deadline reports that Chloe Troast is departing SNL while, in happier news, Marcello Hernandez, Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker are going from featured players to main cast. 

Troast only joined the show last year as a featured player, and was part of some of our favorite sketches from Saturday Night Live’s 49th season: “Protective Mom 2,” “Make Your Own Kind of Music” (which showed off her impressive singing chops), and “Get That Boy Back” (another musical moment). The comedian and actor shared a note on her Instagram yesterday reading: “I wish I was going back to be with all the amazing friends I made there, it truly felt like home. But it wasn’t in the cards. I wanna thank everyone who supported me.” Here’s hoping bigger and better things are ahead of her.  

And now, let’s get to know the latest bunch of Saturday Night Live rookies. First up is San Francisco Bay native Ashley Padilla, who is a member of the Groundlings Main Company and appeared in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. She’s also a Gemini (for whatever reason they include the cast members’ birthdays in the press release), and as a fellow Gemini I automatically feel a loyalty toward her. Padilla has little social media presence, but the one stand-up clip I could find of her from 2017 is hilarious. She’s awkward yet confident on the stage of the Flappers Comedy Club, and the bit where she gets overly emotional about zombie-ant fungus bodes well for her future Saturday Night Live performances. 

Next we have Emil Wakim, a Lebanese-American stand-up, writer, and actor who made his Tonight Show debut at the tender age of 24. The Chicago-born comic was featured as a New Face of Comedy at the 2022 Just For Laughs Comedy Festival and is a Pisces, just in case you were wondering. His Tonight Show appearance is great, including his condemnation of the term “y’all.” I’ve sat on my hatred of that plural pronoun for too long, and I’m glad he’s in my corner. Wakim riffs cleverly on the difficulty of going from years of suppressing his Lebanese culture in order to fit in, to now his friends deriding him for not being proud enough of his background. 

And finally, there’s Jane Wickline, a performer who rose to fame with her deadpan, slightly absurd TikToks. Wickline has nearly a million followers on the platform and was a cast member on TikTok’s live show, Stapleview. She’s from Los Angeles and is a Cancer—a water sign, just like Wakim. That’s a good thing, right? Wickline also tours doing sketch comedy, and her unflinching weirdness might just be that je ne sais quoi Saturday Night Live needs in order to be worth watching.