Kate McKinnon Had An Insane Ritual to Stay Awake for ‘Saturday Night Live’

While Kate McKinnon has said she’d like to return to Saturday Night Live sometime during its 50th anniversary season (“It’s not too far of a train ride” from her New York home), she doesn’t get back to 30 Rock as often as you might think. Turns out her internal clock gets in the way. “I don’t come a lot because I like to wake up really early,” she told Kelly Clarkson this week. That means “I like to go to bed really early” as well. 

Didn’t that circadian rhythm cause a problem when she worked at SNL? The show’s cast and writers famously don’t show up until the afternoon, working through the night to write sketches and riff on performances. “Working at SNL was obviously the greatest years of my life,” she said. But the working hours were “contrary to my natural orientation and so I really had trouble staying up late enough to be on the show.”

What can an early bird do to impersonate a night owl? McKinnon had a ritual for staying awake during show weeks. “I would put on Justin Bieber and dance around,” she admitted. “Just to wake myself, to try to stay up late enough.”

Clarkson wondered if co-workers ever caught McKinnon’s backstage boogie routine. “If they did, they were polite enough not to say,” McKinnon replied. “I tried to go in a little corner but I would be there just dancing.”

McKinnon’s Bieber-cise routine helped her perfect one of her first breakout impressions — or was it the other way around? The first time she tried the character on a live show, McKinnon’s family helped her nail the bit. “I called my mom,” she once told Ellen DeGeneres. “I said, ‘Mom, I can’t. I think I’m going to screw this up.’ And she was like, ‘Just hop around like the Biebs! You know how to hop around.’ She was right. It had to be physical.” 

And McKinnon’s pre-show waker-upper was born. Eventually, the impersonation got even more nuanced. Conan O’Brien once asked her, “What is the key to inhabiting Justin Bieber?”

“I think it’s looking like a puppy who just piddled and is sort of sorry about it,” she explained, puckering up her mouth. “And he’s got those Jolie-Pitt lips. Those lips don’t quit.”

Bieber didn’t seem insulted by McKinnon’s impression when he hosted SNL. “He was very sweet,” she said. “He’s very beautiful to look at. He has the swagger of a gang leader with the face of a member of the Sistine Chapel.”

“A gang leader who just relieved himself on the carpet,” added O’Brien.