After much speculation about which celebrity guest star should play JD Vance during Saturday Night Live’s 50th season, many were surprised to see cast member Bowen Yang dressed as the Republican VP candidate when the show opened. And now, Yang has revealed he never wanted the role.
“Up until the show, I tapped [Lorne Michaels] on the shoulder and I was in the full beard and the full geish and I was like, ‘You can do a buyback if you want,’” Yang explained in a new interview with Them, recalling how he’d tried to get out of the part.
He was so hesitant to play the GOP senator since Vance doesn’t “have a personality,” as Yang put it. But his perception of Vance changed after he watched Hillbilly Elegy, the Netflix adaptation of Vance’s memoir about his life growing up in Appalachia.
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Yang said that the moment that struck him was when Vance questioned as a boy whether he might be gay. As Vance wrote in his memoir, “At the time, the only thing I knew about gay men was that they preferred men to women. This described me perfectly.”
After expressing these thoughts to his “mamaw,” who told young Vance, “Don’t be a f---ing idiot,” Vance came to the conclusion that he was straight.
For Yang, the exchange gave him more to work with to play the venture capitalist turned politician on SNL. “I was just like, ‘Oh, this guy doesn’t have a personality because he’s never had the spine to claim it,’” Yang said.
