After the most recent season of Saturday Night Live ended, Alec Baldwin declared that he was “so done” portraying President Donald Trump on the weekly sketch show. “I can’t imagine I would do it again,” he said at the time. “I just can’t. They should find somebody who wants to do it.”
Those comments echoed ones he made a year earlier, when he threw doubt on whether he would be returning to the part that won him an Emmy Award. “I enjoy doing it,” he said, “but what’s going to happen in the future? I don’t know where I’m going to working, where I’m going to be.” He added, “They should get somebody who can do it all the time.”
Now, with SNL’s 45th season premiere just a few weeks away, Baldwin is once again speaking out about his experience playing Trump. And this time, he sounds even more opposed to the idea of continuing to embody the president on a near-weekly basis.
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On the season three premiere of his YouTube series Hiking with Kevin, former SNL cast member Kevin Nealon asked Baldwin if he ever gets “tired” of playing Trump. “Oh yeah,” Baldwin said. “I think every time I did Trump after the first season—the first season everybody was high, they were in a lot of pain, they were confused.” Even those who “didn’t like” Hillary Clinton thought it was “impossible” that Trump would win the election, the actor said.
Baldwin said the 2016-2017 season, which included a handful of episodes leading up to the election and the beginning of Trump’s first term, was “fun, fun, fun.” But, he added, the next two seasons after that, every time he would have to play Trump, he would sit in his dressing room and think, “I hope a meteor hits this building and kills me because I don’t want to do this ever again. I hate this.”
On the flip side, Baldwin added that every time he thinks “people are sick of this, I’m sick on this, I don’t want to do it anymore,” he’ll go to a restaurant and “50 people say something” positive to him about his impression. “What I don’t like is, I don’t think it’s doing anything,” he said. “It’s not doing anything good or bad for him.”
Later in the episode, Baldwin said that he would “love” to run for public office someday, but his wife Hilaria told him she would divorce him if he did. Asked by Nealon if he has too much “baggage” to run for president, Baldwin said, “Trump had a lot of baggage and he won. I don’t think any of my baggage was sexual assault.”
“My baggage is taking the bait,” Baldwin continued. He claimed that he “wouldn’t be tussling with someone over a parking spot if I were president,” referring to his most recent run-in with the law.
Finally, Nealon asked Baldwin who his running mate would be if he did run for president. “Tom Hanks,” he answered without missing a beat.
For more, listen to Kevin Nealon on The Last Laugh podcast.
