‘Kids in the Hall’s Mark McKinney Talks Playing Canada’s New Prime Minister and How He’s Coping with America’s Hostility Toward His Home Country

Usually, when an actor is asked to play a real-life person it’s because they at least somewhat resemble them. But Mark McKinney looks nothing like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. In fact, the CBC show This Hour Has 22 Minutes — which is somewhat comparable to The Daily Show in Canada — asked McKinney to play Carney despite sharing no common features, save for the name “Mark.”

It all started after someone on X mistook something McKinney said as coming from the then soon-to-be Prime Minister. From there, the joke grew, and McKinney decided to lean into it by saying that he’d always wanted to be the prime minister of Canada and changing his handle to “Canadian Prime Minister Mark McKinney.” 

Being that the Kids in the Hall member is comedy royalty in Canada, perhaps it’s not that surprising that the CBC show quickly scooped him up. McKinney now has a recurring gig on This Hour Has 22 Minutes at least until the upcoming Canadian election on April 28th. It’s an interesting challenge for the sketch comedy star, who recently jumped on a Zoom call with me to talk about the unusual way he got the job and how he’s been coping with America’s recent, totally absurd hostility with our neighbors to the north.

What has it been like playing Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney under very unusual circumstances?

I put up a tweet, and it was about shutting down X in Canada and building a Canadian Twitter. It was the first time I’d been on Twitter in weeks, if not months, but there’s a boiling happening up here. Then someone said, “Hey, Mark Carney wants to change Twitter!” and that went viral. Then someone corrected that and said, “No, that wasn’t Mark Carney. That was Mark McKinney from Kids in the Hall.” Then that went viral and then it scooted across the desk of the producers at 22 Minutes and they started talking to my manager about me coming up from L.A. to play him.

I’m always up for a challenge, and I like 22 Minutes. It’s one of those jobs you drop into where you don’t have time to think, but the people who are around you are really funny and I like that in my diet.

How did you get the impression down?

It was hard. I listened a lot — a few hours walking around the beach in L.A., just hearing his voice. Then I started hearing that sort of vaguely patrician, vaguely high-corporate way of speaking — because he’s Bank of England and Bank of Canada, Davos. This guy doesn’t run for office. He presents himself as impeccably credentialed and is usually awarded some insane promotion. So, he had that kind of energy, which was a little bit harder to tag, but it was all in the rhythm.

Then there was a key moment where he came out and said, after a rather long run-on sentence, “The relationship that we’ve had for bilateral trade with the United States for the last 60 years, in which we’ve known all our lives, is over.” The way he dropped in and paused before looking straight down the barrel of the camera and said that, I went, “Oh, this is who this guy is, this is how he rolls.” That’s what I hooked onto when I did the impression. I just paid very close attention to cadence and clarity. He’s almost Shakespearean.

Up until now, even in Canada, he’s not the most well-known political figure, right?

He was kind of credited in many circles in Canada for avoiding the worst of the 2008 financial collapse. He was positioned as the head of the Bank of Canada at the time. Then, sort of historically, he was so well thought of after that that he became governor of the Bank of England, and there’d never been a non-English governor of the Bank of England until him.

Still, this is a lot of people’s first impression of Carney. Does that affect how you play him in any way?

No. It was more fun knowing that I was going to be playing against Mark Critch’s very bombastic, very funny Trump. He’s all energy, and it was great to be able to play someone much smaller and much more deliberate and still get laughs. It was a perfect kind of contrast of characters and types.

Your comedy has never really been political. The only other thing I can think of that was even a little bit similar to this was when you played Steve Forbes on Saturday Night Live. Do you find any parallels between that and this at all? 

There’s the parallels of the process. When I found out I was going to be playing Carney, I flew in Sunday night, then Monday morning we went to the read-through around 10. Then I’m turned over to the people who are going to make me look like Carney. That was incredibly fortifying in terms of my courage to go out and play him, because there’s the wig and makeup and clothes, and then, suddenly, click, there was a guy. I love that. That used to happen on SNL too when I’d play a celebrity. Certainly it happened with Steve Forbes and a few other impressions, Bill Gates, things like that.

Do the politics of it all affect it?

You have to approach it as a character. If you go out there thinking you’re carrying a message, you’re boned.

Since you’ve never been political in your humor, are you reticent to delve into that?

I read. I’ve got my subscriptions to a bunch of newspapers, and I keep up on it usually fairly intensely — though lately I’m getting exhausted. But it’s kind of a separation of church and state.

Can you talk a little bit about what this moment has been like for you personally, as someone who’s become famous in both America and Canada, seeing this idiotic contention between the two countries?

Funnily enough, during Trump’s first term, I said, “I bet he goes after Canada in some way. Let’s break it up, let’s get that.” In Canada, we always feel like we’re living on shaky ground. We’ve got Alberta, who’ve been pissed off since the 1980s and then Quebec’s perennially like, “We’re not really part of you guys.” So, it just kind of felt like we might be vulnerable to that. But then, to hear it come out of Trump’s mouth is something else. We all knew he didn’t like Trudeau, but when it persisted beyond just ragging on Trudeau to Trump breaking a trade deal that everyone signed, it really matters. 

But, I think the “51st state” stuff is the stuff that’s going to be the toxin that will be hardest to get out of the system. That may lead to a generational effect. All Canadians say the same thing: We fricking love Americans. We all have American friends. And yet, now we’ve got this “stand for Canada” kind of moment. It’s so strange. I haven’t felt anything like this. Most people don’t remember 1967, which was the year of the Canadian centennial, the last time Canadians stayed home and decided to tour the country, getting way into their own history and celebrating it. It’s going to be interesting to see what July 1st, which, by the way, is Canada’s national holiday, is going to be like this year.

Do you consider yourself a patriotic Canadian?

I’m a little warped. I’m a diplomatic brat. We lived all over the world with my dad representing Canada in various places. Like, in Trinidad and Tobago, my little way to earn my 25-cent allowance was I would fly the Canadian flag and put it up above the house every morning. So, I might carry a slight extra load of Canadianness with me. It took this moment though — and we should probably thank Trump for causing us to pull together.

Finally, which American products will you be boycotting?

It’s not so much that I’m boycotting, but I am actually looking to buy Canadian. Kind of pointlessly, I was in the cookie aisle, knowing that I wasn’t going to buy any cookies because I’m trying to diet. So, I was just seeing what cookies are made in Canada and, tragically, the ones in the green packaging, Tate’s, which have really good chocolate chip cookies, aren’t made in Canada. Mr. Tate, can we please make these in Canada? That stuff is crack to me.