Bobby Moynihan may be moving on from Saturday Night Live, but he's still happy to talk about what it was like to live his "life's dream."
The star appeared during the TV Critics' Association summer press tour to promote his new CBS series, Me, Myself, & I, in which he plays the present day 40 year-old version of a character who's also played by John Larroquette and Jack Dylan Grazer, and spoke a bit about what it was like to be a primetime player during on hell of an eventful year, before and after the unexpected election of Donald Trump.
"I felt like I was on one show for eight years and another show for one year," Moynihan said. "It was a completely different machine last year. ... You get so used to never sleeping and writing constantly all night long, and then you think well I made it, I made it through eight years of this, it can't get any worse. And then all of a sudden Trump happens."
Moynihan explained that so much news was happening constantly that the schedule of the show changed.
"Technically, most of us are sleeping until five o'clock on Monday because we're recovering, and then Tuesday to Saturday is when we do the show, but with Trump, you would come in on Friday and they'd be like, he did something nuts, and we're gonna have to redo everything," he told reporters. "There were times where they rewriting cold opens or creating new cold opens on Saturday morning. We would come in and he had done something the night before. It was a whole new ballgame, but I'm so thankful that I was there for that year."
While it was a crazy time for the series and for its viewers, Moynihan says it might be his favorite year ever.
"Like, I was in the audience for [Sean] Spicer, when [Melissa McCarthy] did it. I got to sit there, watch her do that podium and almost get crushed by it," Moynihan recalls. "It was a completely different ballgame last year. The hardest year, easily, for me, and also weirdly maybe deep down one of my favorites. I'm really glad I got to be there for it."
Moynihan didn't get a huge send off when he left the show at the end of the last season, but he got the send off he wanted, partly thanks to being able to appear one last time as the lovingly awful Drunk Uncle on Weekend Update. However, Drunk Uncle's ending was almost a little different.
"For me, it was like, I was just so happy it happened, and I wrote a Drunk Uncle for my last show and it got on and I was very lucky that it did," he said. "I wrote what I thought was a very funny ending to Drunk Uncle where I delivered his real name, and there's a part in the last one where he pulled out a gun and just spun it, and was like, let's do a shot together, and I pull out a gun, and then I'm just like, you first, as a joke, and then at dress, I walked off camera, and you heard a gun shot and [Colin Jost] got sprayed with blood. And I wandered back on and I was like, I'm OK, and was like dude it was just a joke. But that got cut immediately because that was not right. [Lorne Michaels] is a genius and knew that I was trying to be funny and it didn't work."
He also got a send off that we didn't get to see much of on screen, but one that many could only dream of getting.
"I got shockingly sick," Moynihan said of his last night on the show. "I woke up at 4 in the morning, just throwing up and feeling awful, and I think it was just nerves. I knew it was coming, and I get emotional thinking about it. It was the best night of my life, one of the best nights of my life. It was the best, and didn't necessarily get a huge send off, but you don't need that, you were on the show, and then the second the cameras cut off, Tom Hanks and Alec Baldwin and Keenan Thompson pick me up and carry me off stage, and when I think about it…it was the best."
As for why he chose to say goodbye at this time, Moynihan explained that the two year extension on his contract was up, and he just fell in love with the Me, Myself & I script when he read it.
"It's something that I don't normally get to do at SNL," he said. "I got to do everything I wanted to do [on SNL]. I got to be silly and do all the characters and the stuff I love to do, but there's this little tiny part of me that's like, I was an acting major in college. I'd like to show people that I can potentially be a grown man instead of just dressing up as Rosie O'Donnell sometimes—who is the greatest woman in the world. I met her and she was very nice about it, by the way."
Me, Myself & I premieres Monday, September 25 on CBS.