Arrive - Summer/Fall 2016

ATE MCKINNON plays Hillary Clinton on Saturday Night Live. Last October, she played a scene with Hillary Clinton. As Hillary Clinton.

McKinnon had per-
formed her win-at-all-costs, maniacally driven
impression several times before meeting the pres-
idential candidate when Clinton played “Val,” the
bartender to whom McKinnon’s Clinton was left
alone to order another “scalding hot vodka” and
pour out her heart’s desire to win the presidency.

“Rough night?” Clinton-as-Val asked McK-innon-as-Clinton, who responded, “I’ve had a rough couple of 22 years.”

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The skit culminated in the new friends singing “Lean On Me” before Val disappeared, leaving behind her “hard tan business shoe” a la Cinderella, but not before assuring her doppelgänger that she should become Madam President.

When it was over, the real Hillary Clinton won praise for her self-deprecating turn (she “could have supported gay marriage sooner”) and a pretty good Donald Trump impression (“Isn’t he the one that’s like, ‘You’re all losers?’”)

DANA EDELSON/NBC (5)

McKinnon is following in some big real-world shoes. Nine women have impersonated Clinton on SNL over the past couple of decades, most recently Amy Poehler, and McKinnon was, understandably, nervous about meeting the target of her highest-profile impression.

“[Clinton] arrived around 4 o’ clock that Saturday and we had to do a little music rehearsal. … That was a very strange way to meet a leader of the free world who I’ve admired for decades,” McKinnon says, “to have to teach them a song. But she was completely warm and gracious and actually very funny. We ran through the sketch the first time and she hit all the right comedic notes and we [the cast] just looked at each other and were like, ‘Oh, my god. She’s the best.’”

In addition to her made-up characters (see Olya Povlatsky, Les Dykawitz and Barbara DeDrew the cat lady), McKinnon is revered for her impressions of Angela Merkel, Justin Bieber, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and many more. She came up through the New York-based improv troupe Upright Citizens Brigade, and while still a student at Columbia University landed a role on The Big Gay Sketch Show, where she stayed for all three seasons. (McKinnon is SNL’s first openly lesbian cast member.) Then, in 2012, she hit the mother lode—an audition for SNL, where she performed five impressions, two of which were Penélope Cruz and Sally Field. She doesn’t remember the others but says she is one of the lucky ones who didn’t have to run through the infamous gauntlet of auditions.