Trump lip syncer takes on a new role
Way back in 2020, when Donald Trump was still in office and many Americans were stuck at home, Sarah Cooper became Internet famous in a most idiosyncratic way: by lip-syncing some of the president’s more inartful musings.
Using tools she had at hand — her wit, her phone — she built an enormous audience for her short-form videos mocking Trump’s remarks on everything from the coronavirus to crustaceans.
The exercise was a bit of a lark and a bit of a coping mechanism. But for Cooper, an actor-writer- comedian who had had little luck breaking into the entertainment world, it was also a game- changer. She finally signed with an agent (at William Morris Endeavor, one of the biggest talent agencies); she starred in her own Netflix special (“Everything’s Fine,” created with Natasha Lyonne and Maya Rudolph); she adapted one of her books, “How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings,” into a pilot (it did not get picked up but was still “an amazing experience”); and she shot a Jerry Seinfeld film (“Unfrosted: The Pop-tart Story,” currently in postproduction).
Now, at age 45, she is at last doing the thing she has dreamed of since she was a child: performing in a play. She is making her professional stage debut in “The Wanderers,” a drama by Anna Ziegler that is in previews off-broadway at the Roundabout Theater Company, with actress Katie Holmes also in the cast.
Cooper, who last performed in theater as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, has had a circuitous path back. Born in Jamaica, she immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was 3 and at first found little family enthusiasm for her artistic aspirations. “They didn’t think that I’d be able to support myself as an actress,” she said, “which, you know, they had a good point.”
At college she switched her major from theater to economics; after graduating, she worked in tech design. At 30, she quit to try her hand at acting; when that wasn’t going well, she turned to standup comedy, “and then,” she said, “I went broke.”
She wound up managing a design team at Google but quit that to write. And then came the pandemic, the videos and all that followed.
“Those videos absolutely changed my life,” she said during a recent interview at her apartment high above downtown Brooklyn overlooking the Statue of Liberty. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q: What is “The Wanderers” about?
A: “The Wanderers” is about two couples. One couple is very much an arranged marriage, in the Orthodox Jewish community, and the other couple is not arranged. On the surface, it looks like one couple has all of these freedoms and the other one doesn’t. And yet the struggles are very similar between the two.
Q: Tell me about your role.
A: I play Sophie, and I am half-jewish/half-black. I had a huge failure earlier in my career, but my husband is very successful. When we meet Sophie, it’s about 10 years into their marriage, and she is struggling with her identity as a mother and a wife and how that is affecting her longing to be a writer. And she’s really feeling distant from her husband.
Q: You had a marriage end during the pandemic. How does taking this role resonate for you?
A: It’s very personal: I’m a writer as well; I have a lot of impostor syndrome as well; I question my talent on a nightly basis. I just relate to this character so much.
Q: It’s been three years since your first Trump video, which you called “How to Medical.” How do you see that chapter of your life?
A: Right afterward, I was very scared of just being known as the Trump Girl and felt like I wanted to distance myself from it. But I meet people who just come up to me, and they just go, “You made me laugh when it was so hard to laugh.” It’s just made me appreciate it a lot more. Those videos helped so many people, and they also helped me. So I’m thankful for it now, even though I know that if I die right now, my obituary would have the name Donald Trump in it, which is not great, but what are you going to do?
Q: Do you ever feel tempted to do it again?
A: I have no desire. I like the idea that it exposed the meaninglessness of his words, but I think now that it’s been exposed, there’s nothing left to really do with it.