Actor and comedian Mark McKinney is pictured in downtown Toronto on Oct. 2, 2024.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
Thanks to a social-media post that missed its mark, This Hour Has 22 Minutes has found its Mark Carney.
Mark McKinney from Kids in the Hall is set to debut his impression of the Liberal Leader on Tuesday’s episode of the the long-running CBC fake-news and sketch-comedy show.
“The only challenge with playing him is that is that if I don’t move my eyebrows, if I keep them as close to the tops of my eyes as possible, that’s the best,” McKinney said over the phone from Halifax, ahead of Monday night’s taping of the show.
“It’s a hard thing to do, when you’re performing a sketch, to try and make sure that your eyebrows are absolutely immobile.”
While 22 Minutes shared the news of his casting in advance exclusively with The Globe and Mail, McKinney has been tweeting on X, the site formerly known on Twitter, as “Canadian Prime Minister Mark McKinney” in recent weeks.
He changed his profile name as a joke after an account on X seemed to mistake him for Carney last month.
On March 5, Mark the Canadian comedian had posted a short message on the site: “How hard would it be to shut down X in our country and build out a Canadian Twitter? Asking for a friend. Wouldn’t that be a baller move.” McKinney included the hashtag popularized in part by fellow Canadian comedian Mike Myers after his SNL appearances as Elon Musk: #ElbowsUpCanada.
Shortly thereafter, an X user, @truckdriverpleb, posted that “Mark Carney and the Liberal Party are planning to ban X in Canada if they win the next election.” The impression left was that he had mixed up his Canadian Marks.
The tweet went viral after a community note was added pointing out that it was, in fact, the Canadian star of Superstore and Slings & Arrows who had made comments about airing out the Musk from social media in Canada.
An article on cracked.com soon followed, headlined: “People Are Confusing Canada’s Next Prime Minister With One of the Kids in the Hall.”
That bit of clickbait caught the eye of 22 Minutes executive producer and show runner Mike Allison, who decided to reach out to McKinney’s team to see if he would be interested in actually playing Carney on the show.
No audition was necessary, as “we knew he was a funny person,” Allison says. “He’s a legend, really, in this country.”
Since he got the gig, McKinney has been watching a lot of YouTube videos of Carney’s press conferences to prepare.
“He doesn’t have a lot of handles, but he’s an interesting cat,” McKinney says of Carney. (The “handles” in question referring to the angles from which a comedian might approach an impression or caricature.)
“He’s very measured – he almost has an Obama-like cadence,” the comedian says, slipping into an imitation of the Liberal Leader by slowing down his speech so each word of that sentence drips out one at a time.
“The best thing about him is his inability to speak French,” McKinney adds, before doing a devastating impression of Carney saying his French catchphrase, “Nous. Sommes. Maîtres. Chez nous.”
While on the phone with The Globe and Mail, McKinney was sitting in a hairnet with his hair slicked back. He was speaking after a busy morning that included extensive sessions with hair, makeup and costuming and a table read of the episode that would be recorded that night in front of a live studio audience to air on CBC and stream on CBC Gem Tuesday.
McKinney was confident the 22 Minutes professionals had got him physically looking like Carney.
“I didn’t realize he’s got an almost marine haircut – it’s really short back and sides with him,” he said. “He’s a weird combination of incredibly fit – he’s obviously a guy that played hockey in in college, I can see that – but also sort of skinny.”
This isn’t the first time that McKinney – whose CTV reality show, Mark McKinney Needs a Hobby, is currently up for a Canadian Screen Award in the Lifestyle category – has guested to play a Canadian politician on 22 Minutes.
Back in 2013, McKinney flew in to play Doug Ford, then a Toronto city councillor and not yet the premier of Ontario. In the sketch, he was opposite Mark Critch’s Rob Ford, then Toronto’s mayor. Tuesday night’s episode will reunite him with Critch, a long-time cast member, who will pull out his Donald Trump once more.
22 Minutes only has two more regular-season episodes this month, and McKinney, a Canadian citizen who is currently working in Los Angeles, will be sticking around for a few days to shoot material for the season finale.
A 22 Minutes election special tacked onto CBC’s order when the writs were issued will follow on April 24, just four days before the election.
“We might shoot a couple of things to carry over,” Allison says. “It’s not out of the question that we bring him back in.”
McKinney is happy to take part: “It feels like a great time to be reconnecting with Canadian political satire – you know, if ever there was a year.”
