Saturday Night Live is enjoying or enduring – depending on which side you fall – a mass exodus. But it’s not losing a load of staff, rather the extremely versatile Bill Hader.

Hader spearheads the 'Weekend Update' as city correspondent, Stefon. He also acts up as James Carville, Al Pacino, Vincent Price and Julian Assange, and anyone else he’s told to impersonate. He is, by all accounts, a truly adaptable man. “It was a hard decision, but it has to happen at some point,” Mr. Hader said in a recent interview. “It got to a point where I said, ‘Maybe it’s just time to go.’”

Lorne Michaels, executive producer of Saturday Night Live, said: “In terms of intelligence and talent, he was in that same tradition. He was so completely committed to the art of it and enough a student of it that there’s something strikingly original. He didn’t explode onto the air, but gradually he found his voice, and that became a huge thing.”

SNL is also losing another huge talent in Seth Meyers, who is filling Jimmy Fallon’s shoes on NBC’s Late Show. In an interview before taking the stage on Saturday’s edition of SNL, Meyers said: “Working at ‘SNL’ requires 100 percent of your mental capacity — on easy weeks. And so I had not really spent a lot of time thinking about what I was going to do next. Obviously I can’t quit Lorne. So this seems like a pretty good deal that I have an opportunity to keep working with him."

Bill HaderBill Hader doing his comedy thing in Texas