Country singer Morgan Wallen has addressed his controversial “Saturday Night Live” exit, saying he was simply “ready to go home.”
Wallen, 31, made headlines for his abrupt departure after he was the show’s musical guest in March. Whereas many hosts and musical guests remain on stage and mingle with the cast after the show has wrapped, Wallen hugged the host and walked off within seconds.
Over the weekend, he chatted on the podcast “Sundae Conversation with Caleb Pressley,” about the stir his exit made.
“Could you fix a TV, if it was on ‘SNL?'” host Caleb Pressley asked him.
“I could change it for sure,” Wallen replied with a laugh.
“Seriously, ‘SNL,’ did they make you mad?” the host pressed.
“No, no,” Wallen said. “I was just ready to go home. I’d been there all week.”
“You had to get your plane. ‘Get me to God’s country,'” Pressley said, quoting the Instagram story Wallen posted after the show that night, picturing a plane sitting on the runway.
Wallen turned the viral post into merchandise less than a week later, selling baseball caps and shirts on his website.
“SNL” cast members Bowen Yang and Kenan Thompson addressed the unusual exit on TODAY with Jenna & Friends last month, but with a focus on moving forward.
“This is the God’s honest truth: Nothing happened, and so even after it happened, we all just showed up to work the next day because it’s like, you’ve just got to move on to the next thing,” Yang said.
Thompson previously told Entertainment Weekly that Wallen’s exit was “a spike in the norm.”
“I don’t know what goes through people’s minds when they decide to do stuff like that,” Thompson told the outlet. “I don’t know if he understood the assignment or not, or if he was really feeling a certain kind of way.”
