A Lengthy Conversation With Alec Baldwin On Redemption, The Media, NYC Politics & Donald Trump

Earlier this month, I got the chance to sit down with Alec Baldwin in Greenwich Village to discuss what it's like to have the leader of the free world hate your guts and publicly trash you.

Since Baldwin started donning the orange makeup and the bad wig to portray Trump on Saturday Night Live last fall, he's reached a new level of fame. He readily admits that playing Trump has revitalized his career, but it has left him uneasy as well. Not that he needs anyone to feel bad for him.

We also talked about his tumultuous relationship with the media, his new memoir Nevertheless, the redemption arcs of his career, his views on what's wrong with modern politicians, whether he'd ever run for office, and whether he'll continue to play Trump in the future on SNL.

Below, you can read the full hour-long conversation (this interview has been edited and condensed for clarity).

Back in 2014, you wrote that piece for New York Magazine about saying goodbye to public life. In the memoir, you said that really what you meant was that you wanted to say goodbye to dealing with the media, in particular. It seems like over the years, you've had a love/hate relationship with the media. Do you feel like you have an adversarial relationship with them, and why do you think that is at this point? I wouldn't say adversarial, in so far as that implies either party are really all that focused on each other or concerned with each other. I think that my career and what I do or don't do, obviously that's been reinvigorated by doing the Trump stuff, but I don't think...I deal a lot with entertainment media largely, overwhelmingly so. I don't think the entertainment media really cares all that much about their subjects.

There might be people that are covering that beat who love [actors], but I think most people who cover the movies love Tarantino and they love Scorsese, but they don't love a lot of the actors. I think a lot of the writers who cover actors in entertainment, they tolerate, they've been used by them at best.

So I don't have a love/hate relationship, because I don't think they really care about me that much, and I don't really care about them that much. Everybody knows that you're doing this press because you're ordered to do them in your contract. When I did Boss Baby, they had a list of things for me to do, it was stunning. "Here's the 100 hits we want you to do." My god. A lot of people I dealt with in the press, I'm sitting here with you, some of them are pretty good people, but other than that, I probably wouldn't talk to the press at all that much if I wasn't ordered to do it in some contract. You know what I mean?

Right. Do I have a love/hate relationship? No, I feel like my way of putting it is sometimes that relationship works for me, and sometimes it doesn't. The thing is, I have to do it. When I say I wanted my public life to end, by that I meant you don't engage the public by walking down the street. I'm not going to stand in front of my building and sign autographs, because everybody in my business knows, as you know, you engage the public through the media. You speak to the public through the media, fans or ticket buyers, what have you.

I thought to myself, well, there in that kind of mutually-manipulative way, that kind of back and forth about the media, that kind of died. That's why I wrote the book. I wanted audiences to know this about me. I wanted to correct what I thought were misperceptions about me. Now, I feel kind of sickened just saying this because it's such a cliché, but I can't be bothered. I've got my three kids, and where I can deal with the media is like, you go on Jimmy Fallon and you play silly games with Jimmy, it's light and fun.

But the idea of ever doing a serious piece or something where I thought they would have any understanding or have the guts to write what I really think is going on in the world and with the business, and understanding me for that matter, that's never going to happen. Then I realized it's not that important. To sit with someone like you and explain to you who I am or what I'm about or what I'm into, it doesn't matter anymore. I've done that, and all of it is just floating out there in the cosmos of the internet.

I've been looking around online at some of the pieces that have come out about your memoir. A lot of them are like, seven takeaways or the ten best quotes or things like that. We were talking previously about one reporter you mentioned who did this [Thom Geier at The Wrap]. Do you feel like that's a fair way of synthesizing this information and then delivering it to people? Is that better than you talking directly to the press? I don't want to say I have a low expectation of The Wrap, I have no expectation of The Wrap. They're not people I ever talk to or what have you. I don't have any expectation of them, so when [Geier] writes the Katzenberg thing [Note: Geier mentioned Baldwin dissing DreamWorks boss Jeffery Katzenberg on his list of highlights from the memoir], it's really disappointing to me because I'm just coming off the heels of having a tremendous success that was instigated by Katzenberg. Katzenberg asked me to do the Boss Baby film, and it was a very positive experience. I knew that was going to happen. I had done Madagascar 2 with him, I'd done Rise of the Guardians, these family movies.

I had a very contentious experience with [Katzenberg] when we did this movie back in 1990 [The Marrying Man], and what I wrote very carefully in the book was there was that experience, but then as I matured in the business I understood that what he wrote [In 1991, Katzenberg wrote a memo criticizing the movie industry's "tidal wave of runaway costs and mindless competition" which the Times noted "rocked Hollywood"] , in this very cautionary way, about actors and salvaging costs—not just actors, but the costs of filmmaking are going to capsize the boat if you will—that he was right. I grew a different kind of respect for him. He was very right.

Then I went to work for him again, and had this very positive experience. You don't get that from Geier. You don't get that the Disney experience and that the unpleasant Katzenberg experience was a part of a cycle of renewal that I tried to thread throughout the book. He leaves it out.

Is this a typical Hollywood cycle? You go through periods where maybe you're working together on something, then it doesn't go well, something happens— This was one of the only relationships I renewed like this. That's why it was important.

I don't want to dwell too much on Geier, because he's not worth it, but that's an example of something in the book, the kind of kiss-and-slap metric. I kiss far more than I slap, and I extol. I have a whole index at the end of the book of actors, I have this thing called the "Actors Index," and I go on about the people I love. But of course, they do focus on the negative, and that makes me sad really, because I worked so hard to talk about the people I've worked with who I had a beautiful experience with and learned a lot from. I've learned a lot.

I think that people have acknowledged how gracious you were with your praise for coworkers and people in the industry that you really loved working with, but I think it's fair to say that, in a metaphorical sense, a slap is always louder than a kiss. I think that's why people pick up on things like the Harrison Ford grudge, which didn't seem like the most important thing to me, but this is what a lot of people took away from it. I mentioned that only because it's a very important part of the overall story, which for me, that's my redemption. What I'm looking for there is my way back to the kind of work I wanted to do. I say, unequivocally, it's probably the most important part of the book, because I knew that when I went to go do Marrying Man with Katzenberg, although I met my ex-wife [Kim Basinger], I knew that movie was a huge mistake [for my career], and that I should have gone and done Prelude to a Kiss on Broadway and gone with my instincts about what was best for me creatively and work-wise. I didn't do that. I went off and everything went off course, and then I got out of Red October, or found myself pushed out of Red October. I don't mention Ford to spit on Ford. I mention that story as a part of the arc of how I get back on Broadway and therefore get myself back to where I felt I belong.

Baldwin as both Trump and Bill O'Reilly on a recent episode of SNL

In terms of these redemption arcs, how does playing Trump and everything that's happened over the last seven months play into that now? My wife has a line, it's a wonderful line. If I'm whining, kvetching about something, my wife will turn to me and she'll say, 'Nobody feels sorry for Alec Baldwin.' She'll turn literally to anybody on the street corner, 'Do you feel sorry for Alec Baldwin? Anyone? Anyone?'

With that in mind, I think that I don't know anybody who felt sorry for middle class white America—but during this election we found a way to express that middle class America is overlooked, underserved. That was stunning to me, and that was kind of depressing to me, because I thought my God, let's forget about ink in the press on a lot of this, let's forget about clicks that focus on [social issues], let's take our mind off for the moment of the idea that the country's attention seems to be turned elsewhere as far as your concerns, middle class white America. Do you really think in terms of dollars being spent, that the budget of the United States government is being spent significantly less on middle class white Americans than it was? You people are out of jobs because corporations decided it was best for them for you to be out of a job.

The government isn't to blame. The government in fact has probably bent over backwards and given all kinds of onerous tax credits to corporations to save your jobs. The government, whichever administration, are killing themselves to save your job. You don't have a job, but the corporations that bribe the candidates that you fought for.

You have affiliated yourself with the wrong crowd. Your crowd, the Republican crowd, wanted to cut costs, off shore money, and underfund pension funds, they've wanted to hurt you. This party that you believe in is hurting you. I think both parties do that, but one far more than the other as far as I'm concerned. They give tax break to their rich friends and pass it on to you.

I just found that the glorification of Trump, and the assignation to Trump that he was going to solve this problem, the investiture of Trump that he was going solve this problem, was just laughable to me. We all said the same thing: what's Trump's base going to do when he starts to fuck them over and they get hurt, and they realize he's not going to do anything he said he was going to do, and come up with some excuse?

Or find a scapegoat. What I am finding about these guys, one of the ways you really, really accomplish what you want to accomplish—not so much on your own behalf, but to line the pockets of your friends—is you take a stroll through the first term. If you win a second term, you come right out of the gate, you start to trot, and after the midterms and you're into the final two years of your administration, you break out into a dead run sprint of lining the pockets of your friends with as many contracts as you can. That's what governments do. The United States government is a huge spender. It's a huge purchaser, and there's a lot of things that have to be purchased, a lot of it is necessary. No one is complaining about that. The question becomes, purchase from who? The government's money is going to go to who? Contract for who?

What I think we're seeing that's new maybe is the rate at which Trump intends to stuff as much into one term as he can, because he's not quite sure he's going to get a second term. Kushner here, Kushner there, money, deals, Tillerson, Russian oil, this and that, pulling sanctions, these guys aren't so sure they're going to get a second term. They want to shove as much in as they can, they're going to shove ten pounds in a five pound bag if they can.

But renewal for me, there's been a career renewal for me, which I'm very grateful for, and I'm not going to say that it's come with a cost, because yes people have come up to me and just beat that to death. People will thank me, congratulate me, they beam some kind of positivity toward me all day every day about the Trump thing, but in the end what I'm wondering is, if the energy that I get from the public is that exaggerated compared to what I used to get— people would always acknowledge me, and I love your work or whatever, but nothing like this now—

Is this the most in your career? Yeah, the most without a doubt. The point is that when they do that, I wonder how that's going to manifest itself in 2018 and 2020. Tuning in on SNL and appreciating what we're doing, I wonder just how that manifests itself in terms of their politics.

It's a renewal for me in terms of career, but that's not enough, because I honestly don't have any pretensions, I don't, that anything that we're doing is going to influence the election, because obviously it didn't prior to the election. We were on the air several weekends before early November.

You did the whole month of October. Every weekend, so it had no effect on that, but I'm wondering, now that the shroud of a literal Trump presidency has descended on everybody fully, if that's changed people. Some people who were on the fence and said, 'All I know is I hate Hillary, I hate Hillary,' Hillary hating was a big thing, so when they come rolling into the next election, even the midterms, are they going to come to their senses? We can't take any credit for that, but that will be renewal for me if what we've done results in something.

I think that it's unfair to put so much emphasis on comedy solving politics, but I think comedy is very important as a release for people who are frustrated and upset, and don't know how to communicate it. I think that's one of the reasons why people responded so strongly to your portrayal—you gave them this release. One thing I've been continually surprised by is how much Trump has also responded to it.

The show hasn't been on air in a few weeks. He still is complaining about it. He still brings up apropos of nothing that Alec Baldwin is too much, he's very unfair, very unflattering. Do you get any sort of pleasure, or any sort of kick when you realize the president is this affected by you? Yeah, when the president talks about me that way, it just makes me more sad that he's the president that he's got his mind on that. That's a pretty obvious statement to make. But Trump is someone who...you just do the numbers, the Hillary voters, the Sanders voters, the overall turnout, and you realize that Trump is somebody I think a lot of people around this country, especially in big liberal bastions like New York, I think people walk around and they literally just can't believe that these guys gained three states in the electoral college that they just pulled off.

It's like you're ahead by eight points with eight seconds to go, and the other team inbounds the ball and gets the foul and makes the three three times and wins by one point, something stunning. It's like the other team comes and kicks a seventy yard field goal with four seconds left. You couldn't believe these guys—not that they won, but the way they won.

It was a very, very slim margin across the board. I think that for a lot of people, this is not the guy they wanted.

I'll put it to you this way: Trump is a builder. He wasn't an architect. He wasn't a designer. He was a builder. He worked with concrete pourers, and steel makers, and construction crews that manned cranes. Trump went around New York and looked for buildings that were ready to come down, tried to make a deal to take them down, and he'd build another building that was somebody else's design. In the world of building, renovation is a lot more expensive than reconstruction, and very often you don't want to put your name on the renovated building unless it's like the Trump Park Avenue, the old Delmonico Hotel, unless it's a landmark.

Overall, Trump's attitude toward the government is the same thing as it is towards a building. "We're not going to remodel it, we're going to tear it down to the ground, I'm going to build my own thing with my name on it."

That, coupled with a profound ignorance about how government works. Right. I think Trump is sick. I'm not going to say mentally ill, because that doesn't have the connotation that he's dangerous. I think Trump is incompetent. I think Trump is mentally incompetent to be the president, and that may be proven by the way. There is some neurological linguistic rhetorical mapping when he talks and expresses himself in which he makes so little sense. All of this is this armchair stuff, I kind of feel bad doing this kind of speculation when I'm talking to you, but that's the thing about Trump when you see him.

You were saying earlier that there were three things you thought made for a toxic stew with him. His lack of curiosity, this question about his mental capacity which seems, if you want to be affectionate about it, it's like ADHD, like he's a little boy with no patience for details. He just says, "Go, go, go, try to keep up with me. Your problem is that on a political level and on a business level, I'm Mozart. I'm a genius. I'm a Mozart in a world just lined with Salieris jealous of my acumen."

There's his lack of discipline, intellectual and otherwise. Then I think there's his unresolved issues with his father. All of this is such a cliché, I'm terrible, but I've always wondered what's the thing with him? Was it his dad? Did [Trump] cross over the river and come into Manhattan to do the Commodore Hotel like, "I'll show you Dad"? What about the father's state of health at that time, was the father less engaged? I wonder what the conversations were, and we have no history of this. I'd like to know, what did Fred Trump say when Donald Trump said, "I want to do the Commodore in Manhattan, I want to get into Manhattan."

Before he ran for president, did you ever run into him socially or anything in real life? And did that influence your impression at all? Very infrequently. [He was] very back slapping. Trump was someone, and I don't necessarily judge him for this because there's a lot of people like this in New York, he was very much into the drive-by photo op. Get in there, picture, picture, picture, gone. He never lingered. He was not a table-hopper. He was in and out for the press hit, largely for his foundation...and then he was gone. He never lingered anywhere I went.

Baldwin impersonating Donald Trump during a 'We Stand United' anti-Trump rally on January 19th, the day before Trump's inauguration (Getty Images)

Having played him over a dozen times now, have you felt any sort of empathy toward him? Do you find yourself feeling sorry for him at all? Or do you feel like you understand him in a different way perhaps? In certain times in my life, [I thought] that the press hadn't portrayed me, they hadn't communicated what I wanted communicated, and I felt not just disappointed that they didn't communicate what I wanted communicated, I thought that they were unfair, and even out to get me. I got very, very paranoid. I read an article, in which someone said this is, 'Getting in touch with your inner Nixon,' that they're all out to get you.

Later on when you mature a bit, you realize that it's a game you're all playing and you just need to play it better. If you say something, then you said it. If it didn't come out the way that you wanted it to, did the piece not come out or is what you said didn't come out the way you wanted it to? With Trump, I look at him and I see that we're people, we're Trump to someone who doesn't feel appreciated for what he's done. That's a trap we can all fall into.

I ultimately dismiss it with Trump, because it's one thing to have a career where throughout that career, even as some kind of ham-fisted ramp up to running for office, you change your spots, and you behave a certain way, and you comb your hair a different way or what have you in preparation. With Trump there was none of that. With Trump, there was no transformation, there was nothing before he went after that job.

Sometimes I feel sad for him. Like any man who is a father. He has children, he has grandchildren. There's a very good chance, it's not guaranteed, that his name will become a punchline. For the rest of their lives. Then they lose their businesses. The Trump name, they took it all off the Riverside Boulevard buildings as you know. I think that I feel sad for him, because I genuinely feel sad for anybody who is put in the stocks by the press, whether they earned it or not. Anthony Weiner, I felt so horrible for him and his family, even though he brought it on himself largely. I hate to see people go through that.

Weiner does seem like a sad case in particular, because he clearly had issues he needed to work on. But even after he withdrew from public life, there is still a new story once every two months that's just... kicking a man when he's down, which seems unfair. I felt very bad for him, for his wife and his family, and him. It's a lot of pain to wake up everyday and have to face a pain that just is throbbing. On a scale of one to ten, it's an eleven every day. That's tough.

But with Trump, at the same time I thought to myself, there's an expectation. His pain emanates from this expectation he had of being treated a certain way, and he did nothing to build out that reality. I know that if I were going to run for president, I'd make sure I had a year or two years to do it, of playing things in a certain key if you wanted to win. With Trump, there was none of that.

There was no shifts. After all that pre-inauguration talk about how he was going to change and have a presidential shift, it didn't happen. If anything, it's gotten worse—his paranoia and instability have become more public. Right. So my goal is to try to participate with a group of people who will help to keep a flame going. Not even an anti-Trump flame, although that's important. I don't want to ramble here, but I want to give to organizations who are beyond an anti-Trump stance, organizations like MoveOn.org that are interested in talking about larger issues in politics and gerrymandering... Let's take the positive from Trump. Trump has reinvigorated democracy. People are so scared. They're thinking, 'We didn't think it could be this bad, and it could get worse.' It could get worse.

Gerrymandering is an important issue, and I think a lot of people don't necessarily understand why and how it affects them. They also put that in the category with campaign finance reform. It's in kind of what I call the black lockbox. It's a lockbox that politicians and government officials hold on to and they're like, "That's not for the public to know. That's not for the public to understand. You don't need to understand it. This is how we hold onto power. All of us want to keep these jobs forever."

There are men and some women who have let me down as Democrats. Chuck Schumer, when he did nothing—write this down—when he did nothing to help bring the financial community to heel in the wake of the crisis, of course he's bought and paid for by investment bankers and the financial industry here in New York, that was very disturbing to me. I expected so much more from Chuck. I expected so much more from Chuck, and he broke my heart, because he does kind of advertise himself as being much more courageous and three dimensional as a politician than he really is.

Then there's Kirsten Gillibrand—she's the only one who voted against [almost] every one of Trump's appointments. The only one.

I get the feeling she might be gearing up to run in 2020, but I wonder whether she and Cuomo might butt heads over that, whether they might make a deal so only one of them will run then. I think that Cuomo—and I could be wrong, and I don't wish him any ill will—but I don't think he stands a chance whatsoever. I think America is choking on dynastic politics. If there's a whiff of that, even if it's a whiff of a politician saying, "You love me, you remember my dad. Forget about the fact that I tanked the Moreland Commission and I've had all kinds of issues running the state, you loved my dad!" That's not fair, and I'm going to hope you'll print this whole thought, which is there's more to him than that. He is a ravishingly bright guy, tough and everything, but I just think in fairness, I lump him into a category of a lot of people who are kind of well-known names that are in a bullpen, and none of them are going to win.

Elizabeth Warren is not going to run, Andrew's not going to run. If Biden ran, he wouldn't win. If Hillary ran again, she wouldn't win. We need to have something really, really fresh.

Do you think Gillibrand is that voice? Possibly. There was a rumor when Hillary was running that Gillibrand was going to get that seat. The person that made that suggestion to [former Gov. David] Patterson, if I remember correctly, Patterson was the governor at that time, and basically someone who shall remain nameless said to Patterson, "You're going to appoint somebody who is going to be in the shadows," because Chuck was in the shadow of Hillary for all those years, and Chuck was a distant second. It was a two man race for public approval, and Chuck came in third. This person told me that what was said was, "You're going to pick somebody, Patterson, unless you don't want the state's political arm to support your bid for a full term," because he was an appointee because Spitzer dropped out, correct?

Right. For Patterson to have the full support of the Democratic party, Chuck's the front man now. You're going to appoint somebody who nobody is going to even give a second look at. If they left the room, nobody would notice. That was Gillibrand.
She is very quiet, she is not a grandstander. She's not self-seeking at all. Whereas Chuck, as everybody jokes about, he would throw somebody down an elevator shaft to get a photo op. He's very press centric.

In fairness, Chuck is also very bright, Chuck is very hard working, and Chuck, he's been doing this a long, long time. But this idea that the seniority and intended power that comes with incumbency doesn't appeal to me anymore. I totally believe in term limits. I completely 1,000 percent believe in term limits, because as people say, elections themselves would be term limits. Fair elections, real elections where there's public financing. [Think of] somebody like Chuck, who has got more endorsement stickers on him than a NASCAR driver—I think I would love to see them all come to work wearing uniforms that had all their endorsement stickers on them.

Because we don't have elections that can serve the purpose of challenging incumbency for incumbency's sake. Because we don't have that, I totally believe in twelve years across the board. Six congressional terms, two Senate terms, and no longer than twelve. Because we've got to get some fresh blood in there. What's always so revolting to me is: you mean to tell me that here in a country with 325 million people, only these 535 people are going to be electable, we want them to come back and get another chance, and another chance, and another chance? I'm very into term limits.

Baldwin with wife Hilaria, and children Carmen Gabriela & Leonardo Angel Charles at the premiere of 'Baby Boss' (Getty Images)

With the election of Trump, and the way that it's blown the doors open for this idea of the "outsider" candidate, do the Democrats now need an outsider to go up against him? Do they need someone who is outside of the political establishment? Has Trump opened up a door or slammed it shut, and welded it shut? Many people say because of Trump, people are going to insist we need a professional politician, someone like Andrew or Chuck. Maybe Chuck will run. We've had an African-American man run, a woman lost on a technicality, but kind of won in a spiritual sense. Who's to say that we're not going to have a Jewish senator from New York become the President of the United States? You don't know.

I think that people in the United States, they have a terrible dichotomy, and that is that they love their country and they hate their government. The government of the United States has never been less popular than it is now. People absolutely loathe and detest the federal government of the United States. They hate it. They're ashamed of it. They can't believe we've sunk this far. At the same time, a majority of people love their country. I believe that we need somebody to come in who is going to start to sing an old song, an old favorite song, which is to talk about peace. Peace now is a naïve thing, no one talks about peace now. I think that Americans are becoming a little cranky and filled with fear.

I have to ask, since it's related to all this: you seem very active and interested in politics. In the memoir, you mention you almost ran at one point. I thought about it.

It's something that has been floated a few times, and it seems to come back every once in a while with you. So would you ever run for office at this point? A few things. One is... it's a gamble. I'd have to give up the life I have now [with three young children], which even if I had a good chance of winning, that's a risk I don't want to take. But I don't think I have a good chance of winning.

In my mind, Trump has slammed the door on non-traditional candidates, and I think it's not going to happen. Nobody knows they would win, but if I thought I was going to win I'd like to, I would love to lead people in this country on a more spiritual level, and say to them I don't care what your religion is, let's talk about the American spirit. We want other people to do well. I don't want to just do that when everyone around me is falling apart.

The other thing I would want is transparency. I'd have a forum, I'd find whatever the proper and the most effective forum would be to communicate to the American people on a transparent level. Let's have a commission write a report and have some testimony about why we're still giving subsidies to the oil industry. Why are we still giving subsidies to the sugar industry? Let's talk about subsidies in general, and why we give them. We're saying we don't have money for drug addicts to have clean needles to stop spreading disease, knowing that combating that disease down the road will cost us even more money. This is a preventative measure. We don't want to do that, but we want to give all these other handouts to the favorites of the conservatives and the Republicans, the pro-business crowd.

I want transparency. I want to say to the people: here's where your money is being spent, is that what you really want? Do you want to just put it all on me and the administration? And you're going to sit there and go, "I'm good, I really don't want any, I don't have time." Wouldn't you like to learn a little? I would like to incentivize Americans in terms of their civics—what was the death of Citizens United to me?

Citizens United would have been difficult for me to swallow, but what made it impossible for me to swallow were these corporations wanting all the rights and none of the responsibilities. You want to give this right to influence the political process, meanwhile you offshore all that money and not pay the taxes? You don't get anything until you pay your taxes, individual or corporate, you've got to pay your taxes. Then we'll talk about what your opinion is and how you can use your money to influence the election. Right now, the corporations influence the election on par with the Russians influencing the election. They're a foreign entity. US corporations are not an aligned entity. They're not American. A lot of American corporations are not American. They're not paying their taxes.

If I were the president—I don't want to say Manhattan Project, because that implies war and war-making—but I'd want an Apollo Project, because that was more of a peaceful, relatively speaking, kind of alternative. We'd have wind power and solar power up the ying yang if I was president. I would have federal dollars linked to them. You don't get highway dollars until every building you build in your state that is a federal or state facility does not have some component of solar or wind in the process you're doing or passive energy in the process you're doing.

I have to ask, you've said recently that you were not sure whether you'd continue to play Trump on SNL in the future. Is that true? It's only a question of not knowing where we're going to be. There's a chance we might go to Europe in the fall. I'm going to make a film, and we're going to see [my wife's] family. She may be working.

So it's not necessarily about the reactions to the performance, or you growing tired of the impression... No, I think it's fun, and they're dear friends of mine [at SNL]. They all have fun. The only thing I think is that I want to spend an equivalent amount of time redirecting people's anxieties toward what we talked about, whether it's Move On or something.

It's something that I would do, and in all likelihood I will do, but I have no idea where I'm going to be in September and October. The season starts in early October, and the point is, if I'm in Rome doing a film, no, I'm not flying back here on Saturday night to do the show.

It's not quite enough to warrant that. While I was in town, and while this worked, it was great. It was a great experience. If I'm around I'll do it, but who knows where we're going to be.