Throughout its 51-season run, Saturday Night Live has seen tons of cast members come and go, but it never gets any easier to say goodbye. Of course, SNL has produced some pretty big stars, so many go on to do great things, but I still tend to miss them on the NBC series. One of my favorite cast members in recent years was Leslie Jones, and I was absolutely heartbroken when she left Studio 8H. Now she’s revealing the true reason why she had to go.Jones was a writer and cast member on SNL from 2014 to 2019, and she left at the end of Season 43. She might have only been on the show for five years, but she definitely made an impact. However, Jones admitted she didn’t actually miss being on the show, noting she “wasn’t very free.” That being said, in a new interview with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed Podcast, Jones said that things would have been very different had she joined the series much earlier than she did:If they had got me when I was 23 [or] 25, I would’ve stayed there 20 years at least. I definitely would’ve stayed there. Bad, good, whatever. I would’ve stayed. …. Because it’s a good place to be. You can learn, you can get opportunities. They really protect you there. You learn how to write. You learn how to produce. You learn how to cast. You learn how to direct. You learn everything there, everything. And it’s like, when you do come up out of there, you are a college graduate in everything, and you have the connections to be able to do what you want in the industry. I definitely understand where Jones is coming from. Saturday Night Live might be the show for comedians, but it’s also a great launching pad for them to do other work. It’s why a lot of cast members are usually in their 20s and 30s, and then make the decision to leave because they want to branch out. In Jones’ case, she’s one of many celebrities who didn’t get their big break until after 40, and because of that, she had to decide if being on the show was truly the right move for her career-wise since she felt like she was getting up there in terms of time:Now, for me, when I got there, I was 47. So, for me, in my heart, I felt like I was on the time clock anyway. And, yes, I could’ve stayed the rest of my days there, but I was a different person at SNL. I was not doing everything that I wanted to do. You know, I wanna be a stand-up. I wanna do some drama. I wanna do other things. And SNL do take up a lot of time, you know? So it was like, one of those decisions like, ‘OK, if I don’t leave now, I’m not gonna be able to really leave and do what I wanna do.’ So I had to leave while I could.It does make me wonder just how different things could have gone for Jones had she joined SNL in her 20s rather than her 40s. It sounds like she very well could have pulled a Kenan Thompson and stayed there for as long as humanly possible. That’s not to say she couldn’t do that anyway when she actually joined the show. Even though a lot of cast members are able to do multiple things and go on comedy tours while on SNL, their free time is very limited, and Jones’ reasoning for saying so long makes perfect sense.I think it's also worth noting that Jones has confessed to dropping the F-bomb after landing her SNL audition since the series wasn’t what she wanted to do. She was very against joining the sketch comedy show because stand-up comedy was what she wanted to do. I’m definitely very grateful she had a change of heart, even if she did think it was a bit too late in her career. As of now, Jones has yet to make an on-screen return to Saturday Night Live, but she was in attendance at the 50th anniversary special where she got Pedro Pascal’s name wrong. Hopefully she returns to Studio 8H soon, because I would give everything to see her on my screen again, and not just via reruns with a Peacock subscription.