Watch Alec Baldwin Reveal the Key to Donald Trump Impression on ‘Kimmel’
Alec Baldwin discussed how he got so good at impersonating President Trump on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Wednesday. “You’ve gotta kind of think of who [Trump] is,” Baldwin said. “I’ve said this countless times: to me Trump is someone who is always searching for a stronger, better word, and he never finds it.”
The idea originally came from Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels. “Lorne called me and said, ‘do you want to do this?'” Baldwin remembered. “Tina [Fey] and Lorne kind of pushed me to do it.”
Baldwin said his Trump persona came to him on the spot. “The moment the stage manager took me to my mark for the first dress rehearsal at eight o’clock, I [still] had no idea what I was going to do,” Baldwin explained. “I just said to myself, eyebrow up. I tried to stick my face out, my mouth out.”
The actor hopes to play the president at this year’s White House Correspondents’ dinner after Trump announced he would not attend. Baldwin added that despite being on SNL, the competition to play Trump is fierce. “There’s a couple guys on the Internet who are saying … ‘I’m the only man who should play Trump!’ There’s a lot of Trump competition.”
Kimmel said Baldwin deserved the Correspondents’ Dinner gig. “It should be whoever the President hates seeing the most,” the late-night host joked, “and that’s undoubtedly you.”
Baldwin is currently at work on a satirical book about President Trump. You Can’t Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump is due out November 7th.