When historians look back at our current era, few things in the entertainment world seem as destined to make the canon as Alec Baldwin?s Saturday Night Live impression of President Donald Trump. Incredibly though, the iconic moment almost never happened, as the TV personality reveals in the April 2017 issue of Vanity Fair. As it turns out, when Baldwin was first presented with the opportunity, his initial reaction was to politely decline.
"Before I did Trump on SNL, I?d never imitated him or had anything to do with him," writes Baldwin for Vanity Fair, in an adaptation from his new memoir, Nevertheless. "When [Saturday Night Live creator and executive producer] Lorne [Michaels] called me and asked, 'Do you want to do this?' I said, 'No, I don?t want to be Trump on TV!' Because anytime you do any kind of mimicry, it?s of somebody that you appreciate. I didn?t hate Trump. I just didn?t want to play him. But Tina [Fey] and Lorne pushed me, so I finally said yes."
We?re thankful that he did, as Baldwin's Donald Trump impressions are nearly impossible to watch without letting out a laugh (or several). Impressively though, Baldwin didn?t do much brainstorming on how he would nail down Trump's mannerisms; he winged it. "When the stage manager took me to my mark for the first dress rehearsal, I had no idea what I was going to do," he remembers. "I mean, literally, the moment I walked out, I just said to myself, 'Eyebrow up,' and I tried to stick my face and my mouth out. For the actual show, when I was in the makeup room, I put my wig on, and it was like a scene from a mental hospital. I?m getting the wig on me, and I?m sitting there the whole time going 'Gyna, Gyna, Gyna.' I didn?t think about it ? I just did it. Now I should probably tell people, 'I worked on it for months.' "
Baldwin didn?t have to work on it for months to perfect his Trump impersonation, because he already had down a key component: Trump's speech pattern. "To me Trump is someone who is always searching for a stronger, better word, but he never finds it," he reveals. "Whenever I play him, I make a long pause to find that word, and then I just repeat the word I started with: 'These people are great people. They?re fantastic people, and I just want to say that working with them was?a fantastic experience.'"
He might be stuck playing the president for a while now, though, considering how much positive feedback his sketches have earned. "The SNL Trump sketches prompted people to approach me, thank me, and beseech me to 'keep going' more than any other portrayal or piece I have performed," he writes.