James Austin Johnson, Saturday Night Live's Impressions Master, on His Love of ‘The Californians,’ Impersonating Adam Driver n Front of Adam Driver,...

Every Saturday Night Live cast needs a good impressionist, and James Austin Johnson is very, very good. Even before joining the cast in 2021, he was virally famous for his uncanny Donald Trump, but more recently he’s added an uncanny Joe Biden to his arsenal. Part of what makes Johnson so fun to watch is that he’s obviously driven by his passions—you can tell his Bob Dylan, for instance, is a labor of love.

In a wide-ranging interview, conducted as part of the reporting process for the GQ feature “Saturday Night Forever,” Johnson told us about taking a 23-hour train ride home from his audition, celebrating with “dry-ass cookie cake,” and got supremely philosophical about what makes his all-time favorite cast so great.

James Austin Johnson: Oh, you did? Did I show up?

I was like, This is an easy cut. But man, that was the best movie experience I've had. That was just very special. I got two full days on that set, and we shot that whole scene front to back like 400 times. It was awesome.

I started watching probably ‘99, 2000. And I think Jimmy Fallon was my favorite at that moment in history, but just a couple years later, Fred Armisen showed up, and Fred Armisen kind of became the GOAT for me. So I would have to say it's a combo because it was sort of [the] end of Jimmy Fallon era, beginning of Fred's 11-year crazy career.

Man, it's really hard to say. There’s Trump stuff that happens, which is sort of its own beast, because I don't have a lot of characters that I've done 20 times. So I could think about a separate Trump one, maybe the one where he interrupts the Last Supper. I love “I Watch From the Corner,” the one with R&B parents, but I talk about that one a lot. So I'm going to say the one where Andrew [Dismukes] and I are guys pitching a jingle to some lawyers. Yeah. “Jingle Pitch.”

I have spoken about this before, but since you asked about Bob Dylan, I'll go ahead and talk about the first time I did Bob Dylan because, well, it wasn't the first time I did Bob Dylan. I have pitched a Bob Dylan bit once or twice a season since I've been there, and then they've just never gone for it. But Andrew and I wrote one where we were Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen at the recording of “We Are the World.” I don't know if you've seen that documentary, but Bob is really having an off night. And so the whole sketch is, it's the recording of the chorus where all the stars are up in the risers singing “We Are the World.” And you know how Bob looks really confused in that sea of faces? So it's Bob and Bruce Springsteen chatting under their breath during the verses.

[Doing impressions of both Bob and Bruce] “Hey, did you get your sandwich yet, Boss?” “No, I didn't get my sandwich yet.” So it was a sketch about how there had been an intern with a clipboard who came by and got a bunch of sandwich orders for all the stars. And Bob's sandwich is taking a little while, and I'm just so hungry. Bruce Springsteen is like, “Oh, don't look now. Looks like Daryl Hall just got his meatball sub.” And it cuts to Chloe Troast as Daryl Hall getting ready to start munching on a meatball sub. And I'm like, “What? I can't believe they would forget Bob Dylan’s sandwich.” So it reaches a pitch of Bob's frustration.

Then we have to sing the chorus, and then it goes back into the vamping, and it's just us. It's me complaining to Bruce Springsteen and Bruce Springsteen pointing out different stars and their sandwiches. “Oh, look, there's Cyndi Lauper! She just got her veggie delight.” Josh Brolin was Willie Nelson. It was very special, and it did really well at the table. But I think the music licensing for the song was really difficult. Like Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson wrote it. So that song is probably very pricey to license. And there was no way we were going to write a fictional version of it.

I didn't do David Fricke at the audition. That is really my answer for Best Sketch that I've worked on that's never gone to air. But I did do 17 different people at my audition. I did Jeffrey Tambor, Michael Rapaport, Bobby Flay, Anohni and the Johnsons. I did Donald Trump. Lindsey Graham. I did a character I do called the Sweet Southern Guy who was in the Trench Coat Mafia. Louis CK. I basically just did all of my best impressions. I just went in, because I was like, “Okay, I don't think they really have an impressions man at the moment. So I better stake that territory as the impressions man.” Even though I just consider myself sort of a general comedian, I like doing impressions, but I wouldn't self-describe as an impressionist necessarily. I'm happy when others do because it shows great faith in what I do.

And you know what? I'm really proud of my David Fricke impression. I think it's just hard to get a general audience to care about a veteran Rolling Stone editor. People know Rolling Stone, but maybe not the specifics of David Fricke’s voice on a general population scale. And I always say, if you've watched a rock doc, you know this man.

How did I celebrate? I was on a train to Birmingham because I still had a pretty strong fear of flying, and I was so overwhelmed by the whole weekend. My wife was in Nashville and she was six months pregnant. I got the Lorne call as I was leaving New York on Amtrak in coach on a 23-hour trip to Birmingham. And it was the most important audition of my life, and I felt really good about what I'd done. And you almost never get an important audition. You almost never do well at an important audition. So this was the gig I've always wanted since I was a little boy. And the fact that I had just pulled it off was overwhelming, but I didn't get the call [at first]. Sarah [Sherman] got the call, Aristotle [Athari] got the call, so I thought I didn't get the job.

So I was silently crying on a train listening to Natalie Imburgila’s “Torn.” And then I got the call from Lorne and he said that they had had the wrong phone number, and had been trying to reach me. Looking back on it, I should have just gotten off the train in Pennsylvania or wherever it was, and gone back to New York and flown. But I stayed on that train for a full day and ate the microwaved food in the cafe car and just kind of sleepwalked through that train as it crossed the country and thought about my life. And we had a baby that was coming right after Christmas.

So there was a lot on my mind., and I'm one of the only fathers on the cast and definitely the only one with a 2-year-old. So I have never stopped having those kinds of thoughts that I was having on the train of just, How the hell am I going to pull this off successfully? How do I do both? How do I do this huge opportunity that's come in? If I had gotten the job in my twenties, I would've celebrated all crazy. Instead, I was just sort of doing the big life spreadsheet in my head, and I've kind of never stopped doing that spreadsheet in my head. But I will say when I got home, my wife had a cookie cake for me that said SNL BIG BOY on it. And she had gotten a Pikachu balloon from the drugstore. So we had some cookie cake. A dry-ass cookie cake.

It's the one that has Kristen Wig, Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, Jason Sudeikis. That’s the best cast of SNL. I feel very comfortable saying it. There's something really, really special about those years. Every cast member on our show is murderers. I mean, if you've made it and you pull through on this show, there's something that is so bulletproof and special about you as a comedy performer because it is a really high stakes comedy environment. But that cast that has Bill and Fred and the people that bookend that cast too, Maya and so on, I mean, it's just so hard to beat those guys.

I'll tell you what it is—I'm in awe of their connection to each other when I see them in scenes together. They are so bonded. And that is what I tune in for, as a person who enjoys comedy, as a sketch-comedy enjoyer. It doesn't get better than “The Californians.” They're breaking. They're breaking because yes, it's a silly, really fun sketch, but I mean, they're breaking because they enjoy each other. And I think that that is sublime. That's what I'm always striving for, is a sublime moment, what happens in something like “The Californians.” And that's me speaking very, very highly of what is at its core, a very ridiculous sketch. But this is my life's work, so I'm happy to speak that elevatedly about it.

I mean, I really bonded with Owen Wilson right away. Owen had never hosted before, and I had never been on SNL before. So it was both of our first episodes and we were both learning how to read cue cards at the same time. And I don't know, we just kind of got along. He's from Texas. Half of my family's from Texas, and my wife is from Houston. So we bonded on the whole Houston, Wes Anderson of it all. And his brothers were there. I'm in a three-brothers family just like him. So I think it was the mix of the Southernness and the newness and finding out how to do the show together. I played Biden in that first episode and they let me do a sketch I wrote. It's very rare I find for a host and me to be aligned in our tastes and things we find funny. I just don't think of myself really as that cool. I'm cool, but it's a different kind of cool. So for Owen to be psyched about the sketch I wrote where Joe Buck is trying to promote another comedy that's on Fox—you know, how sportscasters sometimes have to talk about a sitcom that's on later that week. And Owen was a big booster of it. I think he just was really excited about playing Troy Aikman in it.

And then, doing Adam Driver to Adam Driver. Pretty nerve-racking. I love doing Adam Driver. I love Kylo Ren. I love Marriage Story. I love Girls. I love everything he does. I think he is hilarious and a little bit of a genius artist, and I like doing my impression of him. But impressions are kind of demeaning just as a concept. And he is huge. Like, he's both a terrifying man as a presence. And he's an intimidating artist. You typically don't get 'em both. You don't typically get a soldier who's a poet. And so I’m doing my impression of him to him, and he was just at the opposite end of the table, just arms folded, kicked back, just watching me with a pretty scary look on his face, watching me do him. I think as much fun as he has, I don't think anybody necessarily directly clowns on him all that much. And you've seen how he interacts with the press. That was a little terrifying. And I just had to shove it all down and try to do the best Adam Driver I could. He said he thought it was funny. I never saw him laugh, but he told me he thought it was funny. I'm going to take him at his word.

I think it's managed to persist for 50 years because of the ways that it changes and the ways that it stays the same. As a person who is on the show now, [when] I go through the rhythms of a week, I'm like, Why do we eat dinner on Tuesday? That's the day that we write. Why don't we eat dinner after pitch on Monday when we're not really doing a whole lot of intense office work? You know what I mean? We need Tuesday, so why don't we just have dinner on Monday? And one time I asked Lorne, “Why do we have this host dinner on Tuesday and not Monday, when we're not really doing a whole lot of intense office work? And he just says, Well, this is the way we've done it. And that is the word of God.

That's the way we've always done it. So I think that it's persisted because it lucked out with what traditions it maniacally adheres to. The production week has not changed. When the production meetings happen has not changed. And when blocking happens has not changed. All of this stuff, the rhythms of it, everyone can trust each other and rely on each other because they've all been apprenticed by people who did it that way. It’s a craft, it's a trade. But it's [also] persisted because it changes all the time. It's persisted because people leave, people get fired, people get hired, and things must shuffle around. The creative engine of the show turns over. And I think that that is what keeps it alive. I think that is sort of the genetic mutation that is so necessary. It's like, the environment doesn't change a whole lot, but the organism adapts to the environment better, almost. And if this were evolution, that would mean that us as this season 50 cast would be the ultimate, the ubermensch or whatever, the ultimate specimen that can survive all environments.

And we're just as vulnerable as any cast has been before. I think we are fabulous. I think that we're up there with just about any cast. But as always, another thing that never changes is people just really like who they saw when they were 15, when they were first getting into the show. And that's the way it'll always be. So I just think about whatever 15-year-old is maybe happening on it with their parents now, I'm like, at some point I'm going to be a certain age and somebody's going to tell me, “Hey, you were my SNL gateway cast.” And then I'll feel the warm fuzzies about my place in its history. But right now it's just head down, do good stuff, do good work. That's all I think about. Do good work.

SNL50: The Anniversary Special airs at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on Sunday, February 16, on NBC and Peacock. To read all of GQ’s coverage of Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary, click here.