Kate McKinnon: the decade when everyone agreed on the talent and disagreed about the films

Kate McKinnon

Photo: Sarah K Joyce / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 6, 1984 Sea Cliff, New York, USA
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Finding Dory, Barbie, Ferdinand
Awards	2 Emmy · Critics' Choice

The first thing you notice in an SNL cold open is who has found the person inside the impression, and who is merely doing a very good one. Kate McKinnon found people. Hillary Clinton’s unexpectedly human exhaustion. Jeff Sessions’s bewildered malice. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s body occupied by someone who will not leave quietly. The impressions were famous, but what was famous about them wasn’t the mimicry — it was the discovery of a character who had been there all along, waiting for someone to look.

She grew up in Sea Cliff, a small village on Long Island that sits at the edge of the water without quite committing to it. Born in January 1984, the daughter of an architect and a parent educator, she taught herself piano by age five, cello at twelve, guitar at fifteen — not a prodigy so much as someone who understood early that instruments were another way to inhabit a character. A British accent she performed in a fifth-grade competition was, she has said, “the genesis of my entire life.” That origin story is almost too tidy to be real, except that everything that followed confirms it.

At Columbia University, studying theatre, she co-founded a musical improv group called Tea Party and performed in Varsity shows alongside Jenny Slate and Greta Gerwig — two people who would go on to shape American film in entirely different directions. The UCB Theatre followed graduation, then Logo TV’s The Big Gay Sketch Show. She had been doing this seriously for years before Saturday Night Live noticed her in 2012.

When she joined SNL as a featured player that April, sketch comedy had not produced a character actor of her specific type in years: someone whose transformation into another person was total, and whose comedy came from conviction rather than from winking at the audience. The gallery that followed — Clinton, Warren, Merkel, DeGeneres, Sessions, Conway, Ginsburg — was less a list of impressions than a roster of psychological studies. She won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2016, then again in 2017: back-to-back, a distinction accumulated by very few performers in the award’s history. She became the longest-tenured female cast member in the show’s history before she left in May 2022.

Ghostbusters (2016) arrived during the height of the SNL years, and McKinnon’s Dr. Jillian Holtzmann — apparently ungoverned by physics, possessed of a sideways brilliance that nothing in the screenplay could quite explain — was the best thing in a film whose reception was more complicated than the character deserved. Critics and defenders of the remake disagreed on almost everything except her. The role demonstrated that the screen could hold her the way SNL held her: you couldn’t look away. What it did not demonstrate was whether Hollywood understood what to do next.

The years that followed traced a pattern familiar from the careers of character actors who have the rare quality of being impossible to upstage: McKinnon in films that were not quite worthy of her. The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018) put her kinetic energy in service of a comedy that didn’t earn it. Bombshell (2019) gave her a quieter role — a Fox News producer who knows more than she says — that she played with unusual restraint, to small notice. When she departed SNL, the tribute that followed was the kind reserved for genuinely historic exits. The films waiting on the other side were not all historic.

Then Barbie (2023) arrived, directed by Greta Gerwig — her Columbia classmate, three decades on — and McKinnon’s Weird Barbie, banished to the margins of Barbieland, scarred from overuse, seemingly in possession of some authority that nobody in the film fully understood, was by common agreement the most interesting performance in one of the biggest films of the decade. It was not the lead. It was going to be the scene that stayed.

The reinvention continued. She starred alongside Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch in The Roses (2025), Jay Roach’s domestic comedy that opened in August to a reception warmer than the original it was adapting. She appeared in In the Blink of an Eye (2026), Andrew Stanton’s science fiction film about three interlocking timelines across 47,000 years, in which McKinnon played Coakley, an astronaut on a 226-year solitary mission to seed a new planet — an ambitious film that won a Sundance prize for its science and struggled to win critics for its storytelling, earning 16 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. She co-created and returned for the second season of Heads Will Roll on Audible with her sister Emily Lynne — a fantasy audio series that recruited Meryl Streep and Peter Dinklage for its first season — and she has published a middle-grade book series, The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science, whose second installment appeared in 2025.

In January 2020, presenting Ellen DeGeneres with the Carol Burnett Award at the Golden Globes, she publicly identified as a lesbian and credited DeGeneres’s visibility with making it “less scary” to accept her own identity. It was characteristically understated: a significant statement delivered without ceremony, which is entirely in character for someone who maintains no social media accounts and gives away very little.

The Lunch Witch, an Amblin production in which she plays the title role — a witch who takes a job in a school cafeteria — is in development. Whether it will be a film in which McKinnon finally has a container big enough to hold what she can do, or another demonstration that the industry remains uncertain how to use her, is the question her post-SNL decade has been asking every year, with increasing urgency.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, actresses, American cinema, Greta Gerwig, Olivia Colman, barbie, Saturday Night Live

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