Bowen Yang is so done playing JD Vance on Saturday Night Live.
The comedian told The Daily Show‘s Desi Lydic that he’s still begging SNL boss Lorne Michaels to reverse course on picking him for the role.
“Lorne asked me and I said, ‘Please, please, please, don’t make me do this,” because “I really find him challenging” to play, Yang said. “First of all, God’s honest truth, I really do my best with him. But every time I have to play him, I go to Lorne and I say, ‘You can do a buyback. You don’t have to stick with me.‘”
Yang first portrayed Vance during the show’s 50th season premiere in September—and he’s been vocal about his surprise that he was Michaels’ choice to play the Ohio-born then-vice presidential candidate. There was plenty of speculation about who would get the gig, and not many would have guessed it would be the show’s first Chinese-American cast member.
Yang revealed last year that he initially refused the role, complaining that Vance didn’t “have a personality” for him to work off of. He’s come around to some degree, he told Lydic Thursday, though he still thinks there are several players who could do it better.
“‘Please reach out to Zach Galifianakis. Please reach out to Taran Killam,‘” Yang said he tells Michaels every time he has to play Vance again, to no avail. But “that’s my charge,” he said, so he enlisted some help.
“You guys are going to roll your f—ing eyes,” he said. “I worked with an accent coach. We had to find the middle between like, Appalachian but Ohio… We really had to find the right” dialect, he explained. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to screw this up! I have I have such an uphill battle here” as an Asian man.
“I’ve got my almond eyes…and everyone in America is going to be like, ‘This Asian guy is playing that guy?’ I was like I really gotta nail this down,” he added, before concluded, “I’m just telling you guys, I’m doing my best.”
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