Andy Samberg says he left ‘SNL’ because he was “falling apart”

He was arguably one of the biggest stars on Saturday Night Live before he left after seven seasons in 2012, but Andy Samberg reveals he was in pretty bad shape.

“I was falling apart in my life,” Samberg said on Kevin Hart‘s Peacock series Hart to Heart.

“Physically, it was taking a heavy toll on me and I got to a place where I was like, I hadn’t slept in seven years basically,” he said.

When his longtime friends and Lonely Island collaborators Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer left the show as writers, Samberg was left holding the bag creating SNL‘s now-viral Digital Shorts — in addition to writing and appearing on sketches on the show. “I … never pretended like I could do [those] without them,” Samberg said.

“We were writing stuff for the live show Tuesday night all night, the table read Wednesday, then being told now come up with a Digital Short, so write all Thursday, all Thursday night, don’t sleep, get up, shoot Friday, edit all night Friday night and into Saturday, so it’s basically like four days a week you’re not sleeping, for seven years. So I just kinda fell apart physically.”

He added what made his decision to leave “harder” was when the show’s producers “told me straight up, ‘We prefer you would stay.'”

Ultimately, Samberg parted ways “to get back to a feeling of like mental and physical health, I have to do it. So I did it and it was a very difficult choice.”