Catherine O’Hara Reveals Reason She Left ‘Saturday Night Live’ After Just One Week

Catherine O’Hara has revealed the real reason she left Saturday Night Live after just one week as a cast member in the 1980s.

The Schitt’s Creek actress says that she felt she needed to remain loyal to the Canadian sketch comedy show SCTV that helped launch her career to stardom.

O’Hara said that she was cast in Season 6 of SNL but quit after a week. “There’s been BS stories about I was supposedly scared by somebody,” she told People. The rumors have pointed to head writer Michael O’Donoghue being the offender.

O’Hara claims the rumors are false and that the real reason she left the show was to remain loyal to SCTV who wanted her back.

“Our producer would get a deal with a network, and we’d have a show for a season or two, and then that deal would go away. There’d be a break, then we’d do the show again,” she said.

During one of those breaks, “I got asked to be on Saturday Night Live. And of course, I said yes. Who doesn���t want to do that?”

SCTV was renewed shortly after, prompting her to leave SNL without ever filming an episode. “Basically I said, ‘Oh, sorry, I gotta go be with my [comedy] family.’ ”

O’Hara admits that it wasn’t necessarily the right thing to do.

“Yeah, not cool to take a job and leave it. You know what I mean?” she says, however, “it all worked out the way it was supposed to.”