Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | October 28, 2025
When Ego Nwodim announced last week that Heidi Gardner would be the first guest on the second season of her podcast, Thanks Dad, my first thought was: We’re finally going to get the tea surrounding their respective exits from SNL over the summer. It didn’t happen. In fact, they barely talked about the fact that neither of them is there anymore. But now, understanding just how close they are - and from Nwodim’s hints that SNL could sometimes be a difficult place to work - I wouldn’t doubt that Nwodim decided to leave only because her best friend was no longer on the show.
And best friends they are, something they spoke about frequently on the episode. It was mostly just two close friends talking about childhood crushes, renovations, the series of boyfriends Gardner’s mother had growing up in Kansas City, and, uh, FaceTiming in the nude.
But they did talk about their time at SNL a couple of times. At the beginning and end of the podcast, they mentioned one episode and one host in particular that they loved: Jack Black, whom Nwodim described as an “angel sent down from heaven.” For good reason. Black’s name came up because Gardner mentioned a four-year-old boy back in Kansas City who had finally received a kidney transplant. When the kid, Beckham, found out he was getting a kidney, he danced to Steve’s Lava Chicken (from The Minecraft Movie). Heidi thought it was so great she sent it to Jack Black, who sent a video back to Beckham singing the song for him.
That’s what Jack Black does (as I can also attest from experience).
They also talked about what a great host he is. Anytime he stumbled during a table read, for instance, “the care that he would put into those moments because he knew that someone spent all night working on those sketches and I just want to get it right. I’ve never really seen that. I love him so much. Such an amazing human and that was a really special week.”
It was also the week that Nwodim famously debuted Ms. Eggy. “It was a very cool week for me,” Gardner said. “I am on cloud nine because [Jack Black] is my hero and also my best friend annihilated the show.”
Nwodim said it was cool to debut that character in front of Black, who sent her a very kind note afterward. “This man is not real. He’s actually better than you expect him to be. We love Jack Black.” Gardner later added that it’s not true that you shouldn’t meet your heroes because sometimes they turn out to be even better than you imagined.
But other than that, they frustratingly didn’t talk about their time at SNL until the very end of the podcast, when Gardner choked up talking about that episode again.
“It was not the easiest place to work,” Nwodim said. “But you were such a huge gift.” She also talked about how they were able to celebrate each other’s successes on the show, even if one of them wasn’t having a great week.
“We worked so hard on that show,” Gardner continued. “We are human. We have egos. We want to succeed. And there weren’t a lot of times when we succeeded the way we wanted at the exact same time … but it was beautiful to watch you succeed so much. And I remember back to that Jack Black episode. It meant so much to me because he was my hero and I got to do so much in the show and I can honestly say that my best friend had the moment of the year.”
“There’s a part of me that is like, ‘Wait, I should want that for me.’ But you had it, and it was f***ing awesome, and I got to go out there and watch it,” Gardner continued, choking up. “To have you have it, and you’re my favorite person in the world. And it was like, ‘How is this my life?’ It was so beautiful. We wanted that, and we got it, and it was just so perfect.”
“There’s nobody like you,” Nwodim told Gardner. “And you were just such a light in what can be such a challenging place for so many people. And it’s just where you stood. You worked from love and came from love, and I feel honored to have been there at the same time as you, and I feel honored to have gotten the gift of a best friend there.”
“And I think back to Jack’s energy, and it’s such an example of how to be and how to come into a space,” Nwodim added. “There were times where I was like, ‘This is an example of how not to be. This is an example of how infectious your energy can be, good or bad, and how you can change the energy in a space just by the way you come in … and I just looked at Black and the light he brought and the care I think soothed all of us. And it was such a long season.”
“What I think matters most,” Nwodim concluded, “is what kind of person you are when you leave that place … if you can leave from a place that can get so competitive and be so self-involved and still be remarkably lovely and such a light and still pouring into other people, I think you succeeded. I think that’s what success is there, and I think you succeeded a million times over,” she told Gardner.
Source: Thanks Dad
