Leslie Jones is looking back at Saturday Night Live with a sharper lens, saying the show’s writers repeatedly boxed her into one narrow role: the “angry” Black woman.
During a recent appearance on The Sam Sanders Show, Jones said her time at SNL became “frustrating” because sketches often leaned on the same characterization. “They would always make me the girl that was angry and beating up people or in love with a white boy,” Jones said. “They just always would make me angry or I’m fighting somebody.”
Jones said she did not push back immediately because she wanted to stay on the show and did not fully recognize the pattern until it kept repeating. But once she noticed it, she said every script started to feel predictable. “Every time I would get a sketch, I was like, ‘OK, who am I beating up this week?’” she said. “I just started getting frustrated with [the writers]. I was like, ‘Stop writing me like that.’”
The comments add another layer to Jones’ recent media run, which has already found her speaking bluntly about gender roles, marriage, and expectations placed on women. In a March 31 interview with Ziwe, Jones rejected the idea of becoming a “tradwife,” saying, “That’s not who the f*ck I am. And my daddy didn’t raise me like that.”
She also said her father told her, “I didn’t raise you to be somebody’s wife,” before calling marriage “legalized slavery” and arguing that a man expecting a woman to be a tradwife “might as well pull out a whip and a chain.”
Jones joined Saturday Night Live as a writer in Season 39 before becoming a cast member in Season 40, making history as the show’s oldest new cast member at 47. She stayed for five seasons, leaving in 2019, and earned two Emmy nominations for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series.
But she said the visibility came with limits. According to Jones, when she objected to the repeated portrayals, the response was that the material was working. “They’re like, ‘This is successful. When you leave here, you’ll be able to make [a career],’” she recalled.
That answer did not sit right with her. “I don’t want to be Chevy Chase,” Jones said. “I want to be Leslie. I want to do everything.”
Asked whether SNL was a healthy place for a Black comic, Jones did not sugarcoat it. “I think that it is the machine that it is,” she said. “That’s just all I can tell you.”
