YOU’RE FIRED!
DARRELL HAMMOND WAS SNL’S TRUMP — UNTIL HE WASN’T
There is just a time when things end, Lorne Michaels will say. Even for the greatest impressionist in Saturday Night Live history.
For Darrell Hammond, that moment came last September. The man famous for his lip-chewing Bill Clinton, his dirty-dawg Sean Connery and, for more than a decade, his Donald Trump, was sitting on a bench near his apartment on the Upper West Side, when he got the call.
The country had changed. The candidate had changed. And Michaels had decided SNL’s Trump needed to change.
Now Alec Baldwin would don the yellow wig.
With Season 42 approaching in a wild election year, Hammond was told the Trump gig was no longer his. But it wasn’t Michaels who would deliver the news to Hammond. The SNL boss outsourced that detail to longtime producer Steve Higgins.
Higgins and Hammond were old friends, both arriving at SNL’s Studio 8H in 1995. They worked closely on some of Hammond’s best material during his then-record 14 years in the cast. The pair had also managed what couldn’t be seen on TV, behaviour that would have shocked viewers, including Hammond’s backstage self-harming incidents that left cut marks on his arms and the 2009 drug binge that landed him in a crack house during his final season as a cast member.
A sober Hammond had returned to SNL in late 2015 to reclaim Trump after an unmemorable three-appearance run by Taran Killam. “The comeback kid,” The Wall Street Journal declared, and Hammond, anticipating a greater role in the fall of 2016, moved back to New York after five years away and spent the summer taking notes on the candidate. Then, Higgins called. Former SNL head writer Tina Fey suggested Baldwin, her old 30 Rock co-star.
“I needed another force, on an acting level, to have the power that Trump was embodying then,” Michaels says. “The Darrell Trump ... it wasn’t the Trump that had gotten darker. It was the Trump from The Apprentice.”
“I just started crying,” Hammond says. “In front of everyone. I couldn’t believe it. I was in shock, and I stayed in shock for a long time. Everything wiped out. The brand, me, what I do. Corporate appearances cancelled. It was a hell of a shock, and all of it was apparent to me in one breath. That ends me.”
On a clear summer morning, Hammond, 61, is a long way from 30 Rock. He sits on Amy and Barry Baker’s patio in Park City, Utah, sipping coffee. The couple, who have held fundraisers for Bill and Hillary Clinton in the past, are throwing a combination baby shower, birthday and graduation party for various family members. Hammond will get $50,000 for a 45-minute set.
He wears black as always, a plain uniform meant to honour a friend who killed himself in 1992. He takes two or three puffs, then stamps his cigarette out. Then Hammond talks, for the first time, publicly, about how difficult he’s found the past 12 months.
He and Paulina Combow, his girlfriend, tried to stay in New York. But the embarrassment of losing Trump felt overwhelming. They watched Game of Thrones on election night. His doctors prescribed him a beta blocker to calm his nerves and a second drug, Antabuse, to keep him from drinking.
He stopped doing Trump in his standup sets. But the president-elect was impossible to avoid.
“I couldn’t get on an elevator, couldn’t walk through a lobby, couldn’t turn on a television, couldn’t walk down Broadway, couldn’t go to my favourite diner, couldn’t go anywhere,” Hammond says. “People would literally pull up in their cars on the way to Lincoln Tunnel to say: ‘What the hell happened? What in the world? Are you OK?’ Like, ‘Why would you give that job up?’”
Higgins had delivered the news, but Hammond says he felt hurt that Michaels, such a central and caring figure in his life, hadn’t sat down to explain the decision directly with him. Then, a few minutes later, he wonders whether he is being too sensitive.
“I don’t want to sound like a large, squawking bird,” he says.