Saturday Night Live’s resident Donald Trump impersonator James Austin Johnson admits that parodying the president is “super-dark” compared to when he started.
Johnson told The Hollywood Reporter that the “sands shift,” when it comes to Trump. “It used to not be as terrifying when he had moderate people around him who were trying to stop him. Now they’re all gone and his enemies are powerless and paralyzed to stop of any it, which all comes across as super-dark,” he said, noting that the challenge now is, “How do you find what’s funny within that?”
The SNL player, now going into his fifth season on the show, said he’s tweaking his impression to mark that “shift.”
“I’m just trying to find new things happening with his speech and his brain and definitely the darkness, which is not easy with a guy who’s been dominating every single day for almost 10 years,” he explained. Johnson spoke THR to promote the new season of his ‘Tis the Grinch Holiday Podcast, which will feature guests including Mark Hamill, The Jonas Brothers, activist Jameela Jamil, and Rob Gronkowski.
Austin also said that he wants to play Trump cleverly, which requires seeing the small details in the chaos that is the media cycle during Trump’s second term. He explained his approach with an analogy. “Hamlet is not saying, ‘I’m going to kill myself because I suck.’ He says he’s thinking about rivers, and bones, and ghosts, and amid all the soliloquies you pick up on an undercurrent of really complex moral struggle.”
He added, “I don’t want to call what I’m doing Shakespeare. But I am trying to find the deeper forms of Trump, who is a rich text.”
THR notes that one recent example of Austin’s riff on his perspective can be seen on SNL in the “Snack Homies” sketch from the week Sabrina Carpenter hosted. In it, Johnson depicts Trump going on a stream of consciousness rant about Ukraine, candy, and George Santos before he suddenly exposes a seemingly aching question for the 79-year-old president—“Do you think I’m getting into heaven?”
Johnson said he hopes to keep impersonating “people that fit into this soft old authority model” and “people in position of great power that have some ridiculous element” in the future.
In the meantime, the White House insisted earlier this month that the show is a bore. “Like the millions of Americans who have tuned out from SNL, I have more entertaining things to do—like watch paint dry,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.
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