When Donald Trump hosted Saturday Night Live back in 2015, everyone involved managed to put a unified face in it: just a bunch funny people, spending quality time with a man they didn’t like, helping to humanize him so he could eventually be president. A year and a half (and a sudden departure from the series) later, and former SNL star Taran Killam is finally ready to open up about that week, touching on Trump’s time on the show during a longer interview with Brooklyn magazine.
Killam gets into Trump-talk through his connection to Hamilton, where he’s been playing King George since January. Asked about Trump’s reaction of the previous cast’s speech to Vice President Mike Pence, Killam replied, “Yeah, well, the president is a moron.” He then went on to give a quick description of the staff reaction to Trump’s appearance on SNL:
It was not fun, and most of the cast and writers were not excited to have him there. I didn’t get the feeling that he was excited to be there, and it felt like a move for ratings from both sides. He was… everything you see. What you see is what you get with him, really. I mean, there was no big reveal. He struggled to read at the table read, which did not give many of us great confidence. Didn’t get the jokes, really. He’s just a man who seems to be powered by bluster.
Of course, Killam just finished directing a new movie, Why We’re Killing Gunther, with Trump’s Twitter nemesis, Arnold Schwarzenegger. So it’s possible he’s just biased, and Donald Trump was just as delightful to do high-pressure sketch comedy with as you’d naturally expect him to be.