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Creator / Kate McKinnon

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"I never want to offend anybody. I always want to do comedy with love, and to make fun of someone as a celebration - really to make fun - but not to deride in the process. To celebrate what's unique and bizarre, but also just great about that person. That's my first thought: What will this person think of this?"

Kathryn "Kate" McKinnon Berthold (born January 6, 1984 in Sea Cliff, New York), is an American comedian and actor.

She's perhaps best known for being a cast member on Saturday Night Live, specifically for her impressions of Hillary Clinton, Ellen DeGeneres, and Justin Bieber, among many others. From 2016 to 2017, she won two Emmy Awards for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, making her the first SNL cast member to win an Emmy for their performance on the show.


Selected filmography:


Kate McKinnon's work provides examples of:

  • Affectionate Parody: Most notably in the case of Hillary Clinton, whom she deeply admires and respects. Also Senator Elizabeth Warren (see The Knights Who Say "Squee!").
  • Beauty Inversion: As seen in the page image, she's a very beautiful lady. On Saturday Night Live, she's often shown playing old men, old women, or hideous monsters that aren't even human. She is also dressed down in Ghostbusters (2016) and has a deliberately bizarre look as Weird Barbie in Barbie (2023).
  • Cross-Cast Role: She portrayed several men on SNL, most notably Jeff Sessions but also Julian Assange, Lindsey Graham, Robert Mueller (before Robert De Niro famously took over), Wilbur Ross, Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran and Rudy Giuliani.
  • Kindhearted Cat Lover: She has a recurring series of SNL sketches, "Whiskers 'R' We", in which she plays the elderly owner of a Dysfunction Junction cat shelter. In one "SNL At Home" episode in Season 45, she filmed a "Whiskers 'R' We" sketch with her own cat, Nino.
  • The Knights Who Say "Squee!": She was plainly pretty thrilled to meet Elizabeth Warren, whom she had been playing throughout the 2020 Presidential race and a few times before that.
  • Large Ham: She gets hilariously over the top quite often, specially in Ghostbusters and SNL.
  • Promoted Fanboy:
    • She has been an SNL fan since she was 12.
    • She had made her love for Gillian Anderson known to the public well before the two worked together on The Spy Who Dumped Me.
  • Stage Name: Her surname is Berthold, but she uses her middle name as a last name when credited.

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