Alec Baldwin reveals surprising ‘Saturday Night Live’ earnings for Donald Trump impression
For most of the fall, Alec Baldwin has provided arguably the best performance in all of television as Presidential candidate (and now President-elect) Donald Trump. It’s been completely absurd, but at the same time completely hilarious and one of the boldest impressions on TV. He has been bashed repeatedly by Trump and his supporters on social media, while also lauded and supported by those who oppose him. Overall, it must be a fairly interesting time in which to be the actor.
What may surprise you is that despite all of his appearances on “Saturday Night Live” over the past few years, Baldwin isn’t really getting much in the way of a hefty paycheck at all. In a new piece from the New York Times, it is revealed that Alec only receives $1,400 for each appearance as the character. Think about that in relation to the money in ad revenue the show has probably received off of his impression, or the salaries of sitcom actors like Jim Parsons or Kaley Cuoco, who get around $1 million for each “Big Bang Theory” episode they make.
Clearly, Baldwin is not in this for the money. He also argued to the publication that going after the President-elect with this impression is important now more than ever:
“…I think that now that he is the president, we have an obligation — as we would if it was him or her — to dial it up as much as we can.”
Baldwin also said that he hopes to continue doing the impression, but scheduling concerns due to some upcoming movie projects could get in the way. Maybe we’ll get to see it here and there moving forward — we know that one option for “SNL” is to hand the impression over to a cast member so that it’s constantly at the ready, but at the same time we would argue that if you still have Baldwin interested in doing this, you probably want to stick with him if at all possible given just how spectacular the impression is.
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