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Former “Saturday Night Live” star Kate McKinnon was baffled because she thought her Hillary Clinton impersonation could have influenced the 2016 election.
When asked if she was worried about the “real-world consequences” of parodying “important” people while appearing on Monday’s episode of Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang” podcast, McKinnon said she thought of political satire as a “double-edged sword.”
“I felt like I was really doing something with my life, something meaningful, participating as peripherally as possible in culture, in history,” he explained, even if it was “just on the sidelines, putting on a wig.”
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While McKinnon liked the idea of telling history through comedy, he never considered how others thought his imitations might affect people’s opinions of the real figures.
“I remember there was an article that said, ‘Will it hurt Hillary Clinton?’ And I was like, ‘God, all of you,'” he said, adding, “I shouldn’t have read, I should’ve never watched, but that idea just broke my brain.”
“Obviously, I don’t think anyone doing satire has the power to influence it, but I didn’t want to hurt anyone, not even people I vehemently disagreed with politically,” said McKinnon, who also impersonated Republican Rudy Guiliani during his decade on “SNL.”
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“I still didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings,” he continued. “There had to be some balance there.”