It is likely impossible to have a conversation with James Austin Johnson that does not eventually touch upon the American South.
Johnson, the “Saturday Night Live” star, was born and raised in Nashville, and he reflects often on how the unique conditions of the South forged not only him but also many quintessential elements of the American character as well.
In a pleasantly discursive two-hour conversation earlier this month, he rattled off several of the South’s enduring contributions: Mark Twain, Flannery O’Connor, jazz music. But he cautioned that the region was also a cradle for charlatans and blowhards.
“You can draw a straight line from the huckster preachers of Twain’s era to, like, Peter Thiel doing Antichrist lectures in Nashville,” he said. The common elements, Johnson added, were “greed and the curiosity of a boring person.”
Johnson’s inquisitive, talkative nature may help explain how this Tennessean ended up playing the quintessential New Yorker: President Donald J. Trump. Johnson has reliably impersonated him for five seasons on “S.N.L.” — not as a bully or a tyrant, as in other Trump impressions, but as a fanciful, logorrheic speaker equally versed in Taylor Swift lyrics, Roblox and turn-of-the-millennium beer commercials.
Johnson, 37, returns with the show when its 52nd season debuts this weekend. As much exposure as “S.N.L.” has given him — not only as Trump but also as Bob Dylan, Andrea Bocelli, airline pilots and suburban dads — Johnson said these roles do not fully encapsulate him.
“I think there’s been some confusion about who I am,” he said.
In an attempt to bring audiences a bit deeper into his brain, Johnson has made his first comedy special, “He’ll Yeah,” which was released this week on YouTube. Directed by Bryan B. Stray and self-financed by Johnson, it is a mockumentary that blends Johnson’s standup segments — a radio D.J. earnestly promoting a miserable Labor Day block party, a sincere country song about Taco Bell — and interviews with friends and colleagues who mercilessly criticize him.
As the special suggests, the real Johnson has more to offer in his comedy than just impersonations. He also has more layers of endearing eccentricity and personal passion that his comedy can barely encapsulate. He is a voracious reader, a lover of vintage cooking shows and an avid consumer of all things cultural. He is still reckoning with how his Southern upbringing shaped him.
And he is especially certain that, for as much as viewers have seen him do, he is still in the early stages of his career.
As Johnson put it, “I fully believe that I haven’t even started doing the thing that is the main thing I end up doing.”
A week before starting the new “S.N.L.” season, Johnson enjoyed an unhurried Italian lunch in Rockefeller Center. He carried a Moleskine notebook, in which he had jotted down old stand-up set lists and ideas for new bits, and he was working his way through Michael Chabon’s essay collection “Maps and Legends.”
Johnson’s introduction to “S.N.L.” in 2021 was hardly as relaxed. Newly hired to the show with what he called a “quarter-cocked” impression of then-President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Johnson ended up playing Biden in the opening sketch of his first broadcast.
He has since carved his niche playing President Trump in dozens of sketches, an impersonation that Johnson said he struggled to capture in his pre-“S.N.L.” open-mike era. His approach back then, he said, “was similar to the tack that a lot of other comedians were taking of, like, ‘I need to teach the world he’s a bad person.’”
What helped him find his rambling, rhapsodic take on the character, Johnson said, was time and practice, along with “plenty of tearful, often rage-filled conversations with my own family members about their support of Donald Trump.”
Johnson recalled arguments in which he told loved ones: “This is not a Christian man. What are you doing?” But eventually, he said, “I realized that their politics and their political gains are more important to them than if the man is a living example of a Christ-like lifestyle.”
Johnson sets aside such judgments in his portrayal of Trump, partly because he came to realize he would never convince anyone to change their opinion of him — certainly not with his comedy.
“I would really like to be doing the funniest version of the character that I can,” Johnson said. “I’m an actor and a storyteller. Wouldn’t I rather find a creative way to embody that?”
Johnson was raised in Nashville, where his family has close ties to the Southern Baptist church and to the religious Trevecca Nazarene University, where he graduated in 2011. Today he describes himself as “an agnostic American Christian ex-vangelical,” though he attends the occasional Christmas Eve service and remains a fan of his parents’ pastor.
In high school and at college, Johnson said he frequently bumped up against guardrails that impeded his intellectual pursuits: He was chided for correcting a teacher’s mispronunciation of the word “disheveled,” and he felt what he called a “general anti-Enlightenment culture of Southern evangelism and conservative pundits” trying to steer him away from books like Reza Aslan’s “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.”
“I’ve always despised the incurious,” Johnson said. “I want to know why things happened the way that they did.”
Comedy, literature, music and theater were all escapes for him that became professional pursuits. After moving to Los Angeles, he landed small roles in films like “Hail, Caesar!” and on shows like “Better Call Saul” before his viral videos of his Trump impersonation got the attention of “S.N.L.”
Johnson’s considerate nature was already known to future castmates like Sarah Sherman, who had frequently encountered in him Los Angeles, where she performed stand-up as her outrageous, body-obsessed incarnation, Sarah Squirm. When they crossed paths later at their “S.N.L.” auditions, she said, Johnson provided her with a crucial pep talk at a low moment.
“I was having a crisis of conscience during the audition because I was like, What am I doing here?” she recalled. “He was like, ‘Dude, it’s a live comedy show — that’s the thing you love most in the world.’ And that one line totally shifted my entire perspective.”
When Johnson arrived in New York to start at “S.N.L.,” his wife, Rebekah, was pregnant with their son, Homer (now 4), and the pandemic was just starting to abate.
He figured he would only occasionally play Trump, who was then politically sidelined. In the beginning, doing impressions offered a means of survival on “S.N.L.” “It seemed like a way I could make myself useful,” Johnson said. Trump’s resurgence and re-election brought Johnson job security, but it has also stereotyped him as a comedian who only does impersonations.
Bowen Yang, an “S.N.L.” alumnus, said he had seen Johnson wrestle with his status as a go-to impressions performer, a role that can be limiting at the show.
“It’s a place that depends on you knowing how to fit yourself into a box, until you earn your trust with an audience,” Yang said.
Yang said he had plenty of firsthand evidence of Johnson’s breadth and complexity. He recounted how they bonded over their mutual love of the Final Fantasy role-playing franchise, adding that it had offered a lens into Johnson’s comic sensibility. Like the games, Johnson’s comedy is “about committing to this absurd reality and caring about the side quest as much as the main plot,” Yang said.
In his impersonations, Johnson is “farming the interior logic of a person that is maybe too well-known,” Yang said. But “something’s a little bit off, and it’s knowingly off, and knowing that is the link that connects him to the audience.”
Johnson admitted he worries about being professionally pigeonholed, and said he has received plenty of encouragement and advice about how to avoid it. (He said Tom Hanks once cautioned him not to become the next Vaughn Meader, the Grammy Award-winning impersonator of President John F. Kennedy, whose career crashed after Kennedy’s assassination.)
Johnson intended “He’ll Yeah” to be a showcase for both his range and his eclectic tastes. He said he’s perfectly happy when “a quarter of the room is losing its mind at half my jokes, while the rest of the room is either chuckling amiably or looking over that group, wondering why they’re not a part of that party.”
“I’ve always been a little bit skeptical of the comedian’s drive to murder every second of a set,” he said.
“When I go to a concert, not every song sends me through the rafters,” he continued. “You’re given peaks and valleys and moments in between. You’re on a journey, with a beginning, middle and end.”
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