Kate McKinnon is on Vanity Fair’s November cover. Inside the magazine, the SNL star gets a sprawling 4,000-word write-up that includes the following things: digressions on the role of the celebrity profile as a medium; a reflection on how the hostile, “transactional” nature of celebrity interviews resembles a police interrogation; a description of a waiter at an unnamed restaurant doing a “discreet dick adjustment”; a digression about whether Trump and Hillary are actually a “gonzo version of Hepburn and Tracy”; and a theory that Alec Baldwin might end up as president with the real Trump playing him on SNL.
Oh, and six quotes from profile subject Kate McKinnon, which are as follows.
On Hillary:
“Hillary has great timing.”
Also on Hillary:
“I love doing impressions of politicians because the task is always to imagine the private lives of these people whose job it is to project an image of staunch, unflinching leadership and grace, and that’s just not how human beings, in their heart of hearts, work. In doing that for Hillary Clinton, who I admire so much, I started to feel very close to her, just trying to imagine her inner life.”
On her most frequent collaborators:
“My most frequent collaborators at S.N.L. are the incredibly gifted writers CHRIS KELLY AND SARAH SCHNEIDER!”
On her inspirations:
“Mary Katherine [Gallagher, the SNL character] is crashing into tables and doing a little dance, and yet she’s so real at the same time. You have to love her so much because she’s a person who’s trying to connect, but is thwarted by everything about who she is. I can relate to that.”
On her upbringing:
“We watched The Producers once a week.”
On her break into showbiz:
“I learned quickly that that was a major fluke and then didn’t get paid again for a long time.”
Meanwhile, on the topic of her sexuality, she gives “a fast, nervous shake of the head.” On the question of what she ate for dinner with Hillary one night “her eyes begin to skitter and jump.” The problem, you see, is that as an interview subject, she possesses “a cat’s sensitivity and suspiciousness … as if she’s equipped with a pair of invisible whiskers, and the moment those whiskers come into contact with something wrong …”
Still, the Annie Leibovitz photos are very nice.
