Alec Baldwin has said he won’t be doing his Donald Trump impersonation for much longer, but could you imagine a world without it at all?
Baldwin told Ellen DeGeneres Wednesday that he almost passed up his famous “Saturday Night Live” persona for a movie role. He was in the middle of movie negotiations when Lorne Michaels began calling to ask if the actor would take on the job.
“I said, ‘I don’t want to play Trump. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,’” Baldwin told Ellen. “’No one wants to be Trump or play him on a show.’”
Thankfully for all of us, whatever job Baldwin was going to take instead fell through. Apparently the actor wasn’t even prepared to take on a Trump impersonation and had never really given it much thought. He figured it all out last minute, as the stage hand was escorting him to the dress rehearsal.
“I’m sitting there going, I have no idea what I’m going to do,” the actor said. “I don’t know what it is. All I remember was watching him and left eyebrow up, right eyebrow down, put your mouth out like this, and that’s all I kept seeing.”
And that’s how an icon was born.
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