Alec Baldwin Agrees With Criticism of His Trump Parody: 'Wasn't Very Good'

Alec Baldwin agrees, in part, with criticism of his portrayal of Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live, although he insists it was never meant to be an on-the-nose impersonation of the former president.

The actor, 64, spent more than four years parodying the real estate mogul, from his 2016 presidential campaign through much of his time in office. He picked up an Emmy Award for his efforts in 2017. But along the way, Baldwin faced relentless criticism for his unflattering portrayal of Trump from a host of conservative voices, including the president himself.

In a video shared Wednesday on Instagram, Baldwin defended SNL from the criticism that former star Rob Schneider has leveled at the long-running NBC comedy sketch show, though he did agree with one of the comic's comments.

"I look at Rob Schneider and I think he made some comment about he thought that my performance as Trump wasn't very good and was very mean-spirited. And number one, I agree with him partly that I wasn't very good, meaning that I wasn't aiming for the most deft impersonation," Baldwin said.

"Brendan Gleeson did a very good job in that [James] Comey piece that he did with Jeff Daniels. And you watched them carefully, where he was walking that edge and not getting in that kind of parody.

"With Trump, it's difficult because he is a parody of himself," Baldwin said. "We've heard that ad nauseam. But I agree with Rob Schneider. I don't think I did a very good job in impersonating Trump. I gave Trump what he deserved.

"I wanted Trump to be a cartoon. I wanted to take Trump to another level of kind of madness and silliness and just weirdness. Trump is a guy who embodies everything you don't want in the president of the United States," Baldwin said.

In a 2017 article for Vanity Fair, Baldwin discussed how he landed the job playing Trump on the show, after initially rejecting the offer.

"I'd never imitated him or had anything to do with him. When [show producer] Lorne [Michaels] called me and asked, 'Do you want to do this?' I said, 'No, I don't want to be Trump on TV!' Because anytime you do any kind of mimicry, it's of somebody that you appreciate. I didn't hate Trump. I just didn't want to play him," Baldwin wrote.

After encouragement from Michaels and 30 Rock co-star Tina Fey, Baldwin finally agreed to play the role. It didn't take much preparation.

"When the stage manager took me to my mark for the first dress rehearsal, I had no idea what I was going to do. I mean, literally, the moment I walked out, I just said to myself, 'Eyebrow up,' and I tried to stick my face and my mouth out.

"For the actual show, when I was in the makeup room, I put my wig on, and it was like a scene from a mental hospital. I'm getting the wig on me, and I'm sitting there the whole time going, 'Gyna, Gyna, Gyna.' I didn't think about it—I just did it. Now, I should probably tell people I worked on it for months," Baldwin said.

Baldwin said he shaped his portrayal by thinking about Trump as a person.

"People ask me, 'What is your whole gag?' And I tell them, 'You can suggest the voice or the way a person looks, but to be successful you have to think of who that person is.' To me, Trump is someone who is always searching for a stronger, better word, but he never finds it.

"Whenever I play him, I make a long pause to find that word, and then I just repeat the word I started with: 'These people are great people. They're fantastic people, and I just want to say that working with them was...a fantastic experience.'"

Trump, meanwhile, didn't hesitate to express his disapproval of Baldwin's portrayal of him.

"He did, I thought, a poor job of imitating me," Trump said on Chris Stigall's radio show last November. "Alec Baldwin was terrible at imitating me, and by the way, if I thought he was good and I didn't like his politics or I didn't like him, I would have said he was good, but he was terrible. I don't actually know him, but I've watched him over the years because of the fact that he did this so much on Saturday Night Live."