Rosie O’Donnell has pitched herself on Twitter to portray White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon on “Saturday Night Live,” but it’s not going to happen.
“I asked Lorne [Michaels], ‘How come y’all aren’t bringing Rosie O’Donnell in or any of them to do it?'” cast member Leslie Jones said in The Hollywood Reporter’s latest cover story on “SNL.” “And he was like, ‘When you’re playing a character, you can’t play it from hate. You have to play it from funny, because when you play it from hate, it looks like you’re just being mean.'”
Jones then noted, “I love Rosie to death, but he might have been right on that one.”
When it came to casting an actor to portray Sean Spicer, although some cast members longed for Chris Farley to have been around, it soon became evident that Melissa McCarthy was perfect for the job. The only one who was hesitant was McCarthy herself.
“I don’t do impressions. I don’t have the ear for it. But when I read the script, I was like, ‘Oh, God, that is juicy, but I don’t understand how we’re going to physically make it work,'” she explained. “To which the amazing special effects person at ‘SNL’ was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s not that big of a deal. That’s gonna take me, like, 15 minutes.’ I was like, ‘Hey!'”
While there has been plenty of fodder for Donald Trump and Melania Trump impressions, the writers initially couldn’t nail down the perfect sketch for Ivanka Trump.
“We’d spend hours and hours trying to come up with an Ivanka sketch and then bail on it because it just didn’t seem right,” writer Chris Kelly revealed. “We had this ‘Titanic’ idea when all the companies were dropping her products. We wanted to make it be like Ivanka was in one of her stores and then the ‘Titanic’ music starts playing and suddenly the walls fall in and water rushes into the store and all of her shoes and purses fall off the shelves into the water.”
“While she lovingly says goodbye to all of them,” added writer Sarah Schneider.
Unfortunately, the cast couldn’t pretend to flood Studio 8H. They landed on the “Complicit Perfume” sketch starring Scarlett Johansson as Ivanka. But cast member Cecily Strong has found huge success depicting the first lady.
“I’d started playing Melania last season. I often end up playing those glamorous types of women, and I love accents, so it was a fun fit. It was really important to us, especially when we did it the year before, to play her respectfully, because it was very evident that it wasn’t her choice to be a part of it,” Strong explained. “She came to the show when he hosted and she kind of pointed her finger at me at the dinner, but she said she liked the impression. I don’t know if she actually did, or he wanted her to and so she did.”