Saturday Night Live Unveils Season 51’s Rising Stars: Meet the New Cast Taking Over Studio 8H

Saturday Night Live did a little housecleaning and then threw open the doors. After a run of departures, Season 51 kicked off by adding five fresh faces to the cast, while familiar heavy hitters like Marcello Hernandez and Bowen Yang are still in the mix. It is very SNL to rebuild on the fly, and Lorne Michaels is clearly leaning into that playbook.

'The show has always brought people in from different ages and different generations, and it is how it revives itself... It is always hard when people leave, but there is a time for that. Our audience has always stayed relatively young, and more so now with TikTok, and change is good. The people we are bringing in I am really excited about.'

Meet the five new cast members

• Tommy Brennan (31) — Stand-up comic with a road-warrior resume. He has opened for Nikki Glaser, Taylor Tomlinson, and the late Louie Anderson, and popped on network TV with a set on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Instagram: @somekidtommy.
• Jeremy Culhane (33) — Comedy utility player you have probably seen without clocking it: American Vandal, Heathers, and The Sex Lives of College Girls. Since 2021, he has co-hosted the very meta Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists podcast. Instagram: @jazzy_jelly.
• Ben Marshall (30) — If you watch SNL, you already know him, even if you do not know you know him. He is one third of Please Do not Destroy, joined SNL as a writer in 2021, and has popped up in sketches ever since. Outside the show, his credits include Poker Face, and he is set to appear in a Netflix project titled 72 Hours. Instagram: @benmarshallstyle.
• Kam Patterson (26) — Stand-up and actor who broke through on the live stand-up podcast Kill Tony. He performed with Kill Tony in 2024 and toured with the show in 2025, and he joined the cast of Netflix's 72 Hours alongside Kevin Hart. Instagram: @kamsoofunny.
• Veronika Slowikowska (29) — Internet sketch comedy standout who landed on TV with What We Do in the Shadows, then in the indie I Like Movies, and most recently co-starred with Leighton Meester and Robbie Amell in EXmas. Her hiring is being touted as SNL's first Canadian cast addition since 1994, which is one of those oddly specific SNL stats that makes longtime fans perk up. Instagram: @veronika_iscool.

Why this batch is interesting

There is some fun inside baseball here. Ben Marshall moving from writers' room to full-time cast is not a shock if you have watched Please Do not Destroy become a staple of the show; it is more like formalizing what has already been happening on screen. Kam Patterson coming in from the Kill Tony pipeline speaks to how SNL keeps raiding the internet and live-comedy ecosystems for pure joke generators. And Slowikowska arriving with viral sketch credibility continues that same trend.

Bottom line: even after the exits, the bench got deeper. The premiere signaled that Season 51 is going to skew young, fast, and very online — exactly the lane Lorne says he wants.