“Mark Carney loves a dramatic pause”: Comedian Mark McKinney on poking fun at the prime minister

The current political, economic and existential turmoil may be keeping us up at night, but in the comedy world it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Mark Critch has been portraying Donald Trump on This Hour Has 22 Minutes for a couple of months. Now, he’s joined by his good pal Mark McKinney’s impression of Canada’s newest (and possibly next) prime minister. The Kids in the Hall and SNL alum plays Mark Carney with sobriety, restraint and a fairly mangled French accent. Here, a behind-the-scenes look at how the impression came to be.

How did your role as Mark Carney come about? I’ve been mostly living in LA. Obviously I was following politics back home, but really this whole thing happened because of a tweet and a misunderstanding. There was that thing a few weeks ago where everyone was talking about Deep Seek. I posted something like: “How hard would it be to shut down X in our country and build out a Canadian Twitter? Asking for a friend. Wouldn’t that be a baller move. #ElbowsUpCanada” It was just a joke, but then I guess someone saw it and got their Marks mixed up—they posted, “Mark Carney and the Liberal Party are planning to ban X in Canada if they win the next election.” And then someone else corrected that person and the whole thing went viral. At some point it all crossed the desk of the people at 22 Minutes. I have a history there: I played Doug Ford back in the Rob Ford era. They asked if I would be interested in playing Carney, and I was like, Yeah—a chance to go to Halifax on the shoulder of winter. Sounds great.
Related: “It’s all attitude and feathers”—Mark McKinney on the Kids in the Hall revival

How did you approach your portrayal of Canada’s newly minted PM? He’s not like Trump, where there’s a big, obvious take on how you play him. I started by really listening to him, because his better hooks are in cadence. He’s a pretty good public speaker, but clearly he’s been speaking to boards, at Davos—places where you don’t have to raise your voice and no one’s going to throw a melon at your head, so he has that very measured sort of delivery with not too many flourishes. It’s not quite a university lecture, but it’s the cousin of that. The hook for me was a speech he gave, I think it was his second day as prime minister, and it was about how the old relationship with the United States, built over decades, including the Auto Pact, blah blah blah, long pause...is over. Let’s just say the guy knows his way around a complex, compound sentence. It’s the dramatic pause. His version of speaking forcefully is that.

Rather different from the Trump model? Right. Trump delivering the same message it would be like, It’s over. It’s too bad it’s over. It was a really good relationship for a long time. I liked it. I love Ontario. I love maple syrup. Who doesn’t love syrup? But the relationship has got to end. It’s time.

You are pretty merciless about Carney’s French skills. As much as I rag on his French, I think his comprehension is quite good. He is able to answer very detailed questions around economics and finance. But he really struggles with the accent. It’s like his mouth can’t get around the French R sound, so instead he goes dry. My parents worked for the Canadian government, and we were posted in France when I was a kid, so my accent is quite good. I had to kind of step on that to sound like someone who can’t make the R sound without running out of saliva.

What about physicality? Does Carney have a signature? He has a very assured walk. It’s not large. He doesn’t swagger. He sort of does a banana swoop to the podium, which I would like to get down. He comes in, does a swoop, looks down, makes contact with the room like you’re supposed to, eyes left, eyes right, often just below the horizon.

Related: Mark Carney is already on to the next crisis

Can you even see over the horizon with those giant eyebrows? The eyebrows are super low, almost right at his brow, and they don’t move a lot, which was hard for me during the live taping. Maybe I’ll have to get Botox. The whole costume came together very quickly. It’s hair, makeup and wardrobe, so we tried the wig and worked on the hair shape. The makeup people worked to carve in my face because I’m chunkier than Carney is.

I think everyone is chunkier than Carney. I wish he’d do a comedian a favour and put on some weight. One thing we do have in common is kind of crappy teeth. His front teeth are shorter than the ones on either side, which is unusual.

In last week’s Liberation Day sketch, we first see you laughing while reading a copy of—what was it? I think it was a book about deficit reduction. Critch and I walked out onto the set, and they had Carney’s office filled with all of these finance books. The idea of him laughing at a really dry economics report made me chuckle, so we went with that. The script was written by the 22 Minutes writers, of course, but we did have a bit of room for improv. Critch and I went out for dinner the night before and came up with a bunch of ideas, some of which made it into the script. There wasn’t really an ending. That whole “Je ne hang-up-er pas first” was improv. The whole thing was very loose and so much fun. Playing off Critch, you have two characters with very oppositional energy, which is great for comedy. Carney on his own might be harder to make funny, but on a phone call with Donald Trump...

It’s been a while, but what do you remember about playing Doug Ford? I would say it was very big-chested, like a boxer staggering into a room, that kind of energy. I think we taped right after that incident where Rob Ford charged across the council floor and knocked over a city councillor.

Ah, the good old days. At least the chaos was just at the city level. It didn’t affect what was going to go on in the Taiwan Strait.

You’re a former Kid in the Hall, and you’ve also worked on SNL. Is there a difference between Canada and America in terms of comedic sensibility? I think you can look at the Trump/Carney sketch and see that it was very balanced. Carney is satirized as much as Trump. There’s the whole joke that we’re a couple of rich white guys who don’t speak French. I think that’s very Canadian. I think if you watch SNL or The Daily Show, it’s going to feel more like it’s coming from one side.

I’m sure you are aware of the debate around Lorne Michaels’s decision to have Trump host SNL before the 2016 election. Some of the staff thought it was platforming and normalizing a toxic and dangerous individual, whereas Michaels thought it was being politically agnostic. What do you think? I think a lot of people were deeply afraid of Trump, and I get that. At the same time, if you’re the living newspaper show, I think you gotta let people come on. When I was on SNL, I played Steve Forbes, who was a controversial presidential candidate, and he came to host an episode. SNL’s Adam McCabe wrote this brilliant sketch where Forbes is a poor roofer up on a roof looking at a rich guy and going, Look at that rich bastard. Where’s mine? I think that’s the move: to undercut with comedy. What was really funny about that is that, when I was playing him, Steve Forbes’s daughters were like, “Oh, this is so great. We love that you’re doing our dad.” Related: “Lorne Michaels wanted to stay in Canada”—This biographer is pulling back the curtain on the king of comedy

Have you heard from anyone in the Carney camp? Not yet, but let me know if you hear anything.

This Hour Has 22 Minutes airs its season finale tonight, and then there’s an election special coming before April 28. Can you share any sneak peeks? The thing is that we tape a bunch of things but we never know what’s going to make it on air. We did an Elbows Up sketch where Critch does a great Mike Myers, so that was a lot of fun.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.