Kate McKinnon’s Jeff Sessions Is Forrest Gump in ‘SNL’ Cold Open

NBC’s Saturday Night Live opened this week with a parody of the 1994 film Forrest Gump, with Kate McKinnon’s impersonation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions standing in for Tom Hanks’ titular character.

“My name’s Jeff, Jeff Sessions,” McKinnon told Leslie Jones while sitting on a bus bench. “I’m the attorney general of the whole United States.”

“I always say life is like a box of chocolates,” said the Sessions character, before adding, “Sure are a lot of brown ones in there,” prompting Jones to leave.

“I never talked to any Russians ever,” McKinnon’s Sessions said, before a bus pulled up and away, revealing a new benchmate. “I talked to the Russians,” the character then immediately said, referring to the recent news of Sessions recusing himself from investigations into members of the Trump campaign’s meetings with Russian officials during the 2016 election.

Later, Beck Bennett’s shirtless Vladimir Putin made an appearance. “This meeting never happened,” he told McKinnon’s Sessions. “I wasn’t going to remember it anyway,” she replied.

The night’s host, Octavia Spencer, also made an appearance as her character from The Help, Minny Jackson, for which Spencer won the best supporting actress Oscar in 2012. She offered the Sessions character a pie that, as in the aforementioned film, may have looked like chocolate but contained a much less palatable ingredient.

Later in the episode, McKinnon returned several times as Kellyanne Conway to poke fun at the Oval Office couch photo of her that went viral earlier in the week. During three random moments throughout the show — when introducing musical guest Father John Misty, during a sketch featuring Spencer and Keenan Thompson, and to close out the Weekend Update segment — McKinnon appeared as Conway kneeling in the position from the photos.

Trump’s White House counselor was criticized after being photographed with her feet up on an Oval Office couch and using her cell phone during the president’s meeting with leaders of historically black colleges and universities on Monday.