James Austin Johnson, the SNL impressionist still auditioning his own voice

James Austin Johnson

Photo: Bryanbstray / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 19, 1989 Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Occupation	Comedian, actor and impressionist
Known for	Inside Out 2, A Complete Unknown, The Running Man

On many Saturday nights, the first voice viewers hear on Saturday Night Live belongs to someone else. James Austin Johnson is the show’s designated president, first Joe Biden and then, far more often, Donald Trump, played as a man drifting from one grievance to the next with nobody in the room to stop him. It is the work most people know him for. It is also the work least likely to tell anyone who he is.

That gap is now the point. His first stand-up hour, He’ll Yeah, asks audiences to meet the Nashville comedian behind the borrowed voices, and it is not the first time he has walked away from a version of himself that no longer fit.

Johnson was born in Nashville in July 1989 and grew up inside the city’s religious entertainment industry. As a child he appeared in productions made by Lifeway Christian Resources, the Southern Baptist publishing house based in town, and he started doing stand-up as a teenager, billed for a while as a Christian comedian. Even then, he told Brooklyn Magazine, he was also working alt-comedy open mics, “dancing like a robot to Pink Floyd”.

He went to Davidson Academy, graduated from Trevecca Nazarene University in 2011 and spent his early twenties in what he later called “Christian movies that no one remembers”, among them October Baby, where he played a character named Truman, and Blue Like Jazz. Quitting that circuit, he said, “was a move that was more true to my actual beliefs.” In 2013 he moved to Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles years were the usual working-comic grind, with credits that look better in hindsight than they did at the time. He was a studio assistant in the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, played Fred Whalen in an episode of Better Call Saul, turned up on Adam Ruins Everything, All Rise and Future Man, and shot a DirecTV commercial with Peyton Manning. The impression that changed his life began as an online habit. In August 2020 a clip of his Trump spread across Twitter and passed a million views; within a year he had an invitation to audition for the show.

He joined Saturday Night Live as a featured player for its 47th season, in 2021, alongside Aristotle Athari and Sarah Sherman. His first job on air was Biden, in the premiere’s cold open. The Trump arrived five episodes later. That season turned out to be the last for eight cast members, Pete Davidson and Kate McKinnon among them, and the newcomer with the presidential voices stayed on through the rebuild. He was promoted to the repertory cast in 2023.

What separates his Trump from the ones before it is method. Johnson largely improvises it, building monologues out of tangents the way the real man does, and he has said that simply repeating things Trump had actually said fell flat on stage. “I want to play it like it’s a man talking alone in a room, and he’d just be saying all that stuff,” he said this June at the Tribeca premiere of Playing POTUS, Josh Greenbaum’s documentary about presidential impressions. Then he went further: “I think I play his charm a little bit more, maybe than Alec did.”

That choice explains the impression’s staying power, and it carries a cost. A Trump played for charm, loose and almost affectionate in its rhythms, is funnier than a Trump played for menace, and also easier to live with every week. The same problem follows Johnson off television. When he took his live show The Age of JAJ to London’s Soho Theatre in 2023, Chortle’s Steve Bennett called him “a brilliant mimic, no doubt about that” but found the hour “hugely patchy, with moments of brilliance mixed with over-long, self-indulgent riffs”, including ten minutes on The Highwaymen that the review judged too niche for a British room. Johnson has been candid about the trap. Shows in older Southern rooms, full of “people who only know me only for Trump and Biden”, are tougher, he told Brooklyn Magazine, because “they’re not really there to see my comedy.”

His other famous voice is Bob Dylan, and it has taken him to stranger places. He voiced Dylan on John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA, Mulaney’s Netflix talk show, and then appeared in James Mangold’s Dylan film A Complete Unknown, not as Dylan but as the emcee at Gerde’s Folk City, the Greenwich Village club of the singer’s early New York years. Voice work has become a second career. He was Pouchy, the talking fanny pack in Pixar’s Inside Out 2, the voice of Trump in She Said and the announcer in Edgar Wright’s The Running Man.

He’ll Yeah is the clearest attempt yet to put his own material first. Written by Johnson and directed by Bryan B. Stray, it was assembled from sets at The Den Theatre in Chicago and Cobb’s Comedy Club in San Francisco, plus a hometown show at Zanies in Nashville. It premiered on 31 August on Gorilla Comedy+, the new streaming service from the comedy label 800 Pound Gorilla, before reaching YouTube on 22 September. Four days later he was back in the cold open of the show’s 52nd season premiere, hosted by the Knicks’ Jalen Brunson, playing Trump opposite Ramy Youssef’s Zohran Mamdani.

Away from the studio, Johnson married Rebekah Lain in 2018. Their son, Homer, named after Johnson’s late grandfather, was born in 2022, and the family has used the show’s breaks to return to Nashville, close to both sets of grandparents.

The next voice on his calendar belongs to a spider. Johnson plays Fuzzy, Red and Silver’s pet, in The Angry Birds Movie 3, which Paramount opens in cinemas on 23 December. It is one more borrowed body, like most of his best-known work. The harder test is the one He’ll Yeah has set: whether the audience that knows him as the president will turn up for James Austin Johnson.

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