“SNL” newcomer James Austin Johnson made a striking impression with his debut on the NBC series this season, appearing in the very first cold open by playing Donald Trump. Johnson had previously become a viral hit for his Trump impression, and he while on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” on Tuesday night he revealed the key to unlocking his uncanny vocal likeness.
Johnson revealed that when he first started doing his Trump impression, it was born out of his anger at the president. “I’m from Nashville, Tennessee, I’m from a pretty conservative environment, I went to church like 18 times a week,” he told Myers. “So the stream of consciousness thing, I think as the more progressive member of my family – I remember the Thanksgiving where I was like, ‘I voted for Obama,’ and nothing. So I’ve always been that guy in my family, so when Trump came on the scene I was pissed… it broke my heart for a long time, and I was a voices guy so obviously I have to try out doing a Trump. So the first times that I tried doing a Trump it just sort of reflected my liberal black sheep anger, like ‘We’re gonna kill everybody.’”
When performing his Trump impression, Johnson quickly learned that merely repeating things that Trump actually said was a buzzkill. “I was saying stuff that no one wanted to hear or I’d say things he actually said, and I just remember the audience always yanking back, especially as I got the voice – as I started sounding like him and I would just say horrific things, people hated it. And you’re performing in noisy bars all the time, you don’t want them to be quiet with no laughs. That means you touched on something that everybody hates.”
The key, Johnson explained, was in realizing that Trump was harping on things from long ago in our past. “At some point I realized like, ‘Oh the stuff he’s talking about we got over hundreds of years ago, he’s bringing up these issues that we don’t even think about anymore,’” Johnson said. “So that’s when I started abstracting him, I made him like a guy talking about the wizard on the hill. I would do like a medieval Trump, like a fantasy movie Trump… and that’s when I started getting the laughs with it.”
Meyers noted that Johnson also hit upon some specific voice noises that Trump makes, and the comedian talked about the difference in Trump’s voice now versus when he was popular in the 1980s. “When he came back in the 2010s ready to be president, his voice had deteriorated a lot,” Johnson said. “Have you ever seen Bob Dylan live now? Like, did I pay for a Tom Waits show? That’s what’s happened to him now… accessing the sort of dark dungeons of my throat was necessary to play this Trump, because he’s not the smooth 80s Trump anymore.”
Johnson’s Trump has been a staple on “SNL” this season, as has his impression of current president Joe Biden. No doubt one or both will be visible on this Saturday’s all new episode with host Willem Dafoe.
Check out Johnson’s conversation with Meyers in the video above. The Trump talk begins around the 6:30 mark.
