Cecily Strong is joining the impressive list of female comedians who are taking their talent beyond the Saturday Night Live stage.
Strong has been asked to host the White House Correspondents Dinner later this month, and she is appearing in her first movie, “The Bronze,” which hits theaters this summer.
Strong is famous on SNL for her recurring character the “girl you wish you hadn’t started a conversation with at a party” on Weekend Update – a sketch she once hosted.
“It was so much fun” to host Weekend Update, she told Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson. But eventually, she stepped down from the role to make time for playing other characters.
“It became clear that it was going to be something that I would have to spend a lot of time on and I didn’t want to lose the sketch side of the show.”
Strong did sit in a newsroom set again recently, but this time as CNN news anchor Brooke Baldwin, in a sketch that poked fun at the network’s coverage of the Germanwings plane crash. Making jokes around the tragedy wasn’t easy for Strong.
“It made me terribly nervous,” Strong said. “But I think you have to be able to laugh at things, and it wasn’t about the plane crash. That is what CNN was talking about, and to make fun of how they talk about it, I think that was a really important distinction.”
Guest
- Cecily Strong, actress, comedian and cast member on Saturday Night Live.
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