Former “Saturday Night Live” stand-out Kate McKinnon was baffled some thought her Hillary Clinton impersonation could have swayed the 2016 election.
Asked if she worried about the “real world consequences” of spoofing “important” people while appearing on Monday’s episode of Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang” podcast, McKinnon said she thought of political satire as a “double-edged sword.”
“I felt like I was really doing something with my life, something meaningful, being engaged in the most peripheral possible way in culture, in history,” she explained, even if it was “just on the sidelines, putting on a wig.”
While McKinnon liked the idea of chronicling history through comedy, she never considered how others thought her impersonations could impact people’s opinions of the real figures.
“I remember there was one article that was like, ‘Will she hurt Hillary Clinton?’ And I was like, ‘God, y’all,’” she said, adding, “Should not have read, should never have looked, but that notion just broke my brain.”
“Obviously, no one, I think, doing a satire has the power to actually influence, but I did not want to hurt anybody, even people I vehemently disagreed with politically,” said McKinnon, who also imitated Republican Rudy Guiliani during her decade on “SNL.”
“I still didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings,” she continued. “There was some balancing to do there.”