It’s undeniable that Saturday Night Live has taken full advantage of the extreme personalities of the Trump administration, running with them all the way to the bank. Ratings are up, Emmy talk is abundant, and NBC has found itself a Must-See TV show again—albeit on an unorthodox night.
But it’s also no secret that this success has come partially at the expense of the show’s regular cast members. Marquee characters Donald Trump and Sean Spicer—once the kind of roles an up-and-coming S.N.L. player could make his or her mark with—have been outsourced to household names Alec Baldwin and Melissa McCarthy. There’s one would-be impersonator, however, who didn’t get a chance to play in the S.N.L. sandbox this year. Despite massive online support, Rosie O’Donnell’s bid to play Trump advisor Steve Bannon was rejected for a very surprising reason.
If the powers that be at S.N.L. decided not to tap O’Donnell because they’re not in the habit of taking impression requests from Twitter (or anywhere else for that matter), that would make a lot of sense. In fact, in a wide-ranging Hollywood Reporter feature on this season of S.N.L., producer Lindsay Shookus says something very similar: “We’ve gotten a lot of pitches from people, big people, like, I can play this person on the Cabinet, or I can play this person. It’s in the vein of Melissa and Alec and Larry David, and it’s never happened before. We got a lot of Kellyanne [Conway] and [Steve] Bannon pitches. But the casting has to make sense. You don’t want to make a splash to make a splash. That’s not what we do.”
But according to cast member Leslie Jones, there’s also another factor at play. When she asked Lorne Michaels why he wasn’t taking O’Donnell up on her offer to embody Bannon, the long-time S.N.L. producer told Jones: “When you’re playing a character, you can’t play it from hate. You have to play it from funny, because when you play it from hate, it looks like you’re just being mean.” The subtext here is that O’Donnell’s personal history with Trump was too heated for her to bring any comedic objectivity to the role.
If you asked some people on the street, though—like the angry Trump supporters Baldwin describes encountering in the T.H.R. piece—mean-spirited hatred seems like precisely the motivation behind some of S.N.L.’s Trump-era sketches. Still, new cast member Mikey Day may be relieved that he gets to keep his gig as the show’s Grim Reaper version of Bannon. He’s luckier than some. Steve Higgins told The Hollywood Reporter that after Baldwin was hired, he felt bad for “poor Darrell [Hammond],” who came out of S.N.L. retirement to replace Don Pardo as the show’s announcer in 2014, and played Trump for much of 2016. And writer Kent Sublette points out that if Melissa McCarthy hadn’t been tapped to play Sean Spicer, “it would have gone to Beck [Bennett]. He has an amazing impression. In fact, he reads Spicer for the read-through because Melissa’s not usually there.”
Bennett is still doing fine—he gets to regularly appear in the Baldwin political cold open sketches as both Mike Pence and a shirtless Vladimir Putin. And there are certainly more eyes on those impressions because of the irresistible draw of both Baldwin and McCarthy. But one can’t help but feel for the regular cast who, almost every week, have to work in the shadow of bigger stars.
