No Alec Baldwin as Trump, but viewers were treated to the return of Kate McKinnon as Jeff Sessions in SNL's Cold Open this weekend.
Everyone’s favorite chameleon Kate McKinnon reprised her role as slow-talkin’ Attorney General Jeff Sessions — but this time with a Forest Gump twist to skewer the good ‘ole boy on “Saturday Night Live.” Gump/Sessions had plenty to chew over about Kellyanne Conway, Russians and races in the cold open — then gobbled down a delicious piece of poop pie.
The scene opens with McKinnon/Sessions/Gump plunked down on a bus stop bench with a box of chocolates talking to various people in a parody of the opening scene from the 1994 Tom Hanks’ movie.
“My name’s Jeff, Jeff Sessions,” McKinnon first tells Leslie Jones. “I’m the attorney general of the whole United States. I got to meet the president and everything.” [...]
Sessions tells another sympathetic listener about his tough times being caught lying at his confirmation hearings about never meeting with Russian officials in 2016.
“I had a bad week,” Sessions/McKinnon explains. “It started out real good. The president made a great speech ... We were all as happy as a monkey with a peanut machine, then I went to bed and got 800 messages and phone alerts saying I was a sneaky little liar. I didn’t know what to do, so my lawyers said, ‘Run, Jeffy! Run!’”
“No,” Sessions says he explained at his confirmation hearings. “I never talked to any Russians ever.” Then he tells yet another bench partner: “I talked to the Russians — twice. I met with a fellow who turned out to be Russian because he was the Russian ambassador.”
After a bus pulls in — and out — Sessions has a new bench mate: Beck Bennett, who appears as shirtless Vladimir Putin. He tells McKinnon: “This meeting never happened.” Sessions responds: “I wasn’t going to remember it anyway.” They fist bump.
Finally, the character Minny Jackson from “The Help,” played by “SNL’s” guest host Octavia Spencer, who played Jackson in the movie, sits down and asks Sessions if he’s the one Coretta Scott King wrote “that letter about.” That was “40 years ago, you still remember that?” McKinnon asks. “Ohhhh a lot of people in Alabama remember that.” She introduces herself as “Minny ... you don’t know me, I’m from another movie.”
