Alec Baldwin Almost Said No To SNL Trump Gig

Alec Baldwin found his comedic soul-mate in 30 Rock producer, writer, actor and comedy queen Tina Fey. But according to a revealing new cover story in Vanity Fair, Baldwin’s feelings were not always merely friendly.

"When I first met Tina Fey—beautiful and brunette, smart and funny, by turns smug and diffident and completely uninterested in me or anything I had to say—I had the same reaction that I’m sure many men and women have: I fell in love," he says in the article, which is an excerpt of his book, Nevertheless: A Memoir.

• Sadly, the 58-year-old comic was spurned when he asked if Fey was single. "She pointed to a man sitting along the wall. Or maybe he was standing? This was Jeff Richmond, Tina’s husband. Jeff is diminutive. Tina describes him as 'travel-size.' When I saw him, I thought, What’s she doing with him?"
• Baldwin also reveals that what has become one of his signature roles – his impression of Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live – almost didn’t happen.
• “When [SNL producer] Lorne [Michaels] called me and asked, ‘Do you want to do this?,’ I said, ‘No, I don’t want to be Trump on TV!’ Because anytime you do any kind of mimicry, it’s of somebody that you appreciate,” Baldwin, who’s hosted SNL a record 17 times throughout his career, writes. “I didn’t hate Trump. I just didn’t want to play him. But Tina and Lorne pushed me, so I finally said yes.”
• In a video interview with Vanity Fair he explains further: “I was supposed to do a film. And the people who were doing the film were supposed to escrow money to guarantee that I would get paid. And they didn’t put the money in escrow. And that’s when I hung up and said I’m not going to go do the movie and I’m going to go do the thing with Lorne. And I think to myself, ‘What if I hadn’t done that?’… It’s turned out to be this incredible opportunity.”

April’s issue of Vanity Fair hits newsstands Thursday, March 30th. Nevertheless: A Memoir is due out this month from Harper.