Back on October 1, 2016 Alec Baldwin hit a home run with the audience of Saturday Night Live with his first performance playing then Presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Baldwin would go one to portray Trump on throughout the Presidential election and beyond, gathering up loads of laughs with each passing appearance.
However, many people out there, including myself, wondered at the time, what happened to Darrell Hammond? After all, he had been portraying Donald Trump (and several other Presidents) for years on SNL and he just up and disappeared.
In a new profile on Hammond for the Washington Post, we get our answer. And that answer is heartbreaking and depressing as hell.
“I needed another force, on an acting level, to have the power that Trump was embodying then,” [Lorne] Michaels says. “The Darrell Trump . . . it wasn’t the Trump that had gotten darker. It was the Trump from ‘The Apprentice.’ ”
Hammond did not take the news well. It was all his girlfriend could do to get him back to his apartment.
“I just started crying,” he 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 canceled. It was a hell of a shock, and all of it was apparent to me in one breath. That ends me.”
