-Our next guest is a very funny comedian
you know from his work on "Saturday Night Live,"
which airs this Saturday at 11:30 on NBC and Peacock
with host Willem Dafoe and musical guest Katy Perry.
Please welcome to the show James Austin Johnson, everyone.
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
-Welcome to the show!
-Wow. Hello, everyone.
-I have a lot of questions about "SNL,"
but I want to start by congratulating you
on the birth of Homer! Look at Homer, everybody!
-I had a baby? -You had a baby.
[ Cheers and applause ] -You're kidding me.
-And you posted this on Instagram.
And thank you very much for promoting the show, Homer.
-"Late Night with Seth Meyers."
-I also don't think I even have one of those.
-Well, I have 47 of them, and I think he had just spit up,
So I had just changed him into number 31.
-You got to have backups with how much they spit up.
So this baby was born this month.
-This month. He was born January 4, 2022.
Is that where we're -- -That's where we're at,
yeah, yeah. -And he's beautiful.
He's actually gorgeous.
He's a very beautiful boy. -That's great.
-And he looks exactly like my wife, which is awesome.
[ Laughter ] Doesn't have a freaky,
long, character-actor beak.
[ Laughter ]
-Working backwards, this means that you got hired on "SNL."
At the time, that meant that you had -- your wife was pregnant.
And then, you had to move to New York City.
A lot happened all at once for you.
-Dude. [ Laughter ]
If no one has ever told a woman who's six months pregnant
that she has to move to New York in the middle of winter, I --
You should do it. You should give it a try,
because that was one of my favorite conversations
I've ever had. -Yeah.
It's a perfect reason to do it! And I have --
I mean, I feel like some of your experience
I'm familiar with because I was also on "SNL,"
but my first year, I was in like two sketches.
-Right. -Your first episode,
you opened the show playing Joe Biden.
-Yeah. -Which is --
I cannot even imagine the pressure of taking that on.
-That's me. -It was fantastic.
And now I had heard you do some impressions before,
but I had not heard your Biden. Did you have a Biden?
-My Biden was on the list. When I got here,
they asked me to send them a list of all the impressions
that I do, and I would say that Biden was like
you know, number 38 down the list of, like,
my confidence level in it.
But they had seen a video of me doing Biden, and they were like,
"Yeah, that may come up down the road."
That was, like, what I heard
when I was getting seen for the show.
-But on the first Saturday, when did you find out
you were gonna play Biden? -Like, Thursday night.
Like, Thursday night. [ Laughter ]
Thursday night, I had one of those cryptic Lorne meetings
where he, like -- you walk into a room, and he's like,
"How do you feel about wearing pants?"
[ Laughter ]
Like, he just asks you those weird questions,
and like 45 minutes later, you think,
"I think they're gonna ask me to do Biden, maybe."
-Right. -It was that kind of --
"Are you comfortable with accessories?"
-Right. "Would you like to wear teeth?"
-He asked me when I went in, and I realized after the fact
it was the meeting he hired me in,
one of the things he said was,
"And obviously, we'll need to see how you look in wigs."
I was like, "What?" [ Laughter ]
Did you know when you had your meeting with him,
did you know he had hired you? -Yeah.
So, they have this, after you do the audition, you go in,
and maybe you'll have a meeting with him,
and I got called into one of those meetings.
And very mysterious and cryptic
and warm at the same time somehow.
And he was like, "Are you married?"
I was like, "Yes, I am." "Children?"
"My wife is five months' pregnant at this point.
She's about to be six months' pregnant."
-"That's a good sign." [ Laughter ]
"When's your baby due?" And I was like Christmas Eve.
And then he, like, looks at the big calendar
of when the shows are gonna be on his wall, and he goes,
"You have a show December 18th." [ Laughter ]
I was like, "Uh, I do?" I'm, like, washing my hands
like 30 minutes later, like,
"Did I just get...? Do I have to move?"
-Did you ever get an official call of any sort?
-[ Laughs ] They said --
After that meeting, they were like,
"Tomorrow, you might be getting a call
from a very important producer." [ Laughter ]
I was like, "Okay, this is it. I think it's gonna happen."
And then, I went to a movie with some friends.
My phone was on like 5% because that's how I live.
-Yeah. -And I was like,
"Please, don't die. Please, don't die.
If this phone dies, and I miss this call,
they cast me back out into commercial-actor hell."
-That's a thing, if Lorne -- famously, if Lorne
gets voicemail, he's like, "Who's next on the list?"
-Yeah. Lorne, famously, if there's one hurdle, he quits.
You know what I mean? [ Laughter ]
-Yep. [ Laughter ]
-And I didn't get a call. And then I was like,
I was so drained from the process,
and I had shot a big thing for the whole month beforehand,
so I was like -- My wife was on vacation
with our families in Tennessee. I was here in New York.
I was like, "I'm not getting on a bumpy Southwest flight
right after the most stressful audition of my life
and just sitting back down in Nashville,
trying to eat baked beans while my hands are, like,
going like this.
"Can I get some more pork shoulder?"
And I was like, "I can't -- I need to decompress somehow.
So I took an Amtrak train from New York to Birmingham.
-Now, that strikes me as even shakier than eating beans.
[ Laughter ]
-24 hours in a coach seat on Amtrak?
What are you talking about?
You got the guy reaching over you with his like little cord.
"Can I plug this in?" [ Laughter ]
And so I was hanging out on the Amtrak train,
and I got a call from a weird number.
And I picked it up, and the girl was like,
"Lorne Michaels for you.
And then he got put in, and I was, like, crying.
I was, like, in tears because I was, like, just so exhausted.
And they didn't call when they said they were gonna call.
-Yeah. -So then, I get patched through
to Lorne, and he's like, "Yeah, we got the wrong number."
[ Laughter ]
"So I think I've hired somebody else, too."
[ Laughter ]
"Where are you?" "Oh, I'm on an Amtrak train
from New York to Birmingham."
And he goes, "Oh, what a glamorous life you lead."
[ Laughter ]
"By the way, you need to join the cast
of 'Saturday Night Live.'" -Well, that's wonderful.
You made a great choice. I first became aware of you --
I think maybe a lot of people became aware of you --
hearing your Donald Trump impression.
You were also playing Donald Trump on the show.
-Also Donald Trump. -Yeah, so that's two --
the last presidents. That's good.
That's a hot start. -Yeah, both current presidents.
It's really interesting to -- to play both guys.
But I think, as a team, they're doing a great job.
-I think so, too. [ Laughter ]
Team of rivals. -Little bit of him,
a little bit of that guy, mix it up.
It's pretty interesting having to differentiate.
I haven't had to do them both in the same sketch yet, but...
-Yeah. -...with TV magic,
anything's possible. -Could happen.
Your Trump is very stream of consciousness.
-Oh, yeah. -When did you come to that
sort of awareness that that was the fun part of doing him?
-So, I'm from Nashville, Tennessee.
I'm from a pretty conservative environment.
I was raised in -- I went to church
18 times a week or something like that.
And so the stream of consciousness thing,
I think I just, as the more progressive member of my family,
I remember the Thanksgiving where I was like,
"I voted for Obama." [ Laughter ]
Nothing. [ Laughs ]
So I've always been that guy in my family,
and so when Trump came on the scene, ooh, I was pissed.
-Yeah. -Ooh, I don't like this guy!
He's weird, and he's mean. [ Laughter ]
And it broke my heart for a long time, and then,
I was a voices guy so obviously I have to try out doing a Trump.
And so the first times that I tried doing the Trump,
it just sort of reflected my liberal black-sheep anger.
You know, I mean, "We're gonna kill everybody."
You know, I was saying stuff that no one wanted to hear,
or I'd say, like, things he actually said,
and I just remember the audience just always yanking back,
especially as I got the voice.
As I started sounding like him...
-Yeah. -...and then 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've touched on something
that everyone hates. [ Laughter ]
They're putting down their Moscow mules to hate it.
And then, at some point, I just started, like --
I realized, like, "Oh, the stuff that 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,
so that's when I started abstracting him.
I made him like a guy talking about the wizard on the hill.
Like, I would do a medieval Trump,
like a fantasy-movie Trump. "You know, what?
The King is doing nothing about the gigantic dragon.
We've got this giant dragon that nobody's doing anything about.
And, you know, the guy who comes through in the morning?
He does the swords, and he's banging the hammer,
and I said, "You know what? If I could just --
believe me, this is true -- only I could get the amulet.
Only I can get the amulet. And that wizard --
We're gonna make that wizard's head spin.
When I have the enchanted sword,
we're gonna plunge that enchanted sword
straight into the dragon's soft underbelly."
[ Laughter ]
And that's when I started getting the laughs with it.
-Yeah, very nice. [ Cheers and applause ]
-Thank you. -Yes, please.
-Thank you. -You also --
Like, you obviously have a very good ear for this.
You made this observation by listening about --
he makes, like, weird throat noises.
-Yeah. I mean, he's been in
the public consciousness for a hundred years.
-Yeah. -We have known him.
He's in "Home Alone 2." [ Laughter ]
You know what I mean?
I think he had a show on this network at some point.
-Oh. -He's -- He's been around.
-Yeah. -We've been listening to him.
So you have all these different impressions of him.
Everybody does a different era of Trump.
You know what I mean? And he --
When he came back in the 2010s, ready to be president,
his voice had deteriorated a lot.
Have you ever seen Bob Dylan live now?
[ Laughter ]
Like, did I pay for a Tom Waits show or something like that?
That's what's happened to him, and his voice is very gurgly.
"Hillary. He goes back here,
and there's a lot of --"
So accessing sort of --
accessing sort of the dark dungeons of my throat
was necessary to play this Trump because he's not
the smooth '80s -- "She's got beautiful legs."
He's not really '80s Trump anymore.
Remember '80s Trump? -Yeah.
[ Laughter ] -'80s Trump.
"She's a very nice person.
I'm looking forward to speaking with her."
He's not that guy anymore. "Man, she's beautiful,
and I'm gonna take over everything, baby."
He went down. -He went down.
-He went a few floors down. -And we have a lot more
we're gonna talk to with James Austin Johnson
right after this. [ Cheers and applause ]