Kate McKinnon builds a whole person out of one tic and a way of standing, and she does it in the time other actors take to find their light. Films have so far used her for a minute at a time. Those minutes are usually the best in them.
Fi1m perspective
Goggles up, hair up, dancing to DeBarge with a blowtorch in each hand. That is Jillian Holtzmann in Paul Feig's Ghostbusters (2016), and it is how Kate McKinnon works: she arrives in a film as if she has been given a different set of instructions from everyone else, and she is plainly having a better time than they are. Whenever the plot needs a gadget, Holtzmann has built it, and the scene where she lays her new weapons out on a table and talks the others through them is the funniest thing in the film. The film belongs to her. Feig's finale, twenty minutes of green light with the jokes switched off, does not, and she has nothing to do in it.
The method comes from a decade on Saturday Night Live, from 2012 to 2022, where she became the longest-serving woman in the cast, after The Big Gay Sketch Show and the Upright Citizens Brigade. She did Hillary Clinton, Jeff Sessions, Kellyanne Conway, Ellen DeGeneres and Justin Bieber, and she did invented people, an alien abductee called Colleen Rafferty among them, with the same precision. She has described how she does it: "It always starts with the way they talk, and then you add the layer of their energy." Sketch comedy teaches you to be complete in thirty seconds, and she is.
Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023) understood this and used her accordingly. Her Barbie is the one who was played with too hard: felt-tip on the face, hair cut with kitchen scissors, legs stuck in a permanent split. We laughed and then felt a small pang, because everyone who ever owned a Barbie made one of these, and McKinnon gets the whole of that, the joke and the hurt under it, in about a minute of screen time. Nobody else in a film that runs to speeches in its second half is as economical.
The fair complaint is that her film parts have mostly been the SNL character moved to a bigger screen. Holtzmann and the played-with-too-hard Barbie are both the odd one in the corner who has misread the brief, and she is wonderful as both, but they are cousins. Bombshell (2019) gave her a dramatic part, Jess Carr, and Joe vs. Carole (2022) gave her a lead on television; we have not reviewed either, so we will only say the appetite to try is there.
What nobody has yet done is hand her a plain woman and a long scene. The tics are the trade, and they are very fine tics, but a career built on a minute at a time has a ceiling. We would like to see a director keep her still for an hour and find out what is underneath.
Biography
Kate McKinnon, born Kathryn McKinnon Berthold, is an American actress and comedian. She was a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 2012 to 2022, becoming known for her character work and celebrity impressions.
McKinnon appeared in the film Barbie (2023). Her other film credits include Ghostbusters (2016), Bombshell (2019) and Yesterday (2019). She has also provided voice work in animated films and series such as Finding Dory (2016) and Nature Cat.
For her work on Saturday Night Live, McKinnon received ten Primetime Emmy Award nominations and won twice for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.
