This will be good. Alec Baldwin is returning to Saturday Night Live on November 19 to play President-elect Donald Trump — so set your DVRs!
The 30 Rock alum had been impersonating the real estate mogul opposite Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton on the NBC comedy institution in the lead-up to the presidential election on November 8, but Baldwin was noticeably absent on the sketch comedy’s first postelection show on Saturday, November 12. (Instead, McKinnon-as-Clinton sang an emotional version of the late Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in the cold open.)
Baldwin, 58, told Vanity Fair in an interview posted online Friday, November 18, that he’s coming back to SNL this weekend, but don’t count on seeing him every week playing the former reality TV show star.
“I’m going to do it again this weekend, but not all that often,” Baldwin said. “There was a lot of things online that was said about it — like why didn’t I do it after the election? I was booked that weekend. Not even other jobs; we have things to do. It crashed every weekend.”
His wife, Hilaria, who welcomed the couple’s third child, Leonardo, in September, told Vanity Fair that the rigors of prepping for and shooting the live late-night show take a toll on family time.
“When he does SNL, it takes a big chunk out of it because you’re up so late, and then it eats into the next day,” the yoga instructor, 32, said. “And for us, with little kids, it’s hard.”
The Oscar-nominated star said in an interview last week with WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show that he was “trying to shed the Donald Trump cloak.”
“I’m not an impressionist, per se, but if you do any kind of comedy and they ask you to do that, most of the time, there’s some degree of appreciation, I think, involving somebody you like,” he added. “Trump is somebody who — I don’t hate Trump, but he’s not somebody I admire, so it was more difficult.”
In October, Trump, 70, slammed Baldwin’s portrayal of him, tweeting, “Watched Saturday Night Live hit job on me. Time to retire the boring and unfunny show. Alec Baldwin portrayal stinks. Media rigging election!”
Trump went on to win the election, picking up the required 270 Electoral College votes, but he lost the popular vote to the former secretary of state, who currently leads him by 1.4 million votes, with more than 4 million votes still to be counted in states including California and Utah.
Saturday Night Live airs Saturdays on NBC at 11:30 p.m. ET.
