SNL star Leslie Jones on ticking off Trump: 'Of course we loved it'

Saturday Night Live star Leslie Jones got inside President Trump's head when she lobbied to play him in February, and now she's opening up about how she and her cast mates felt getting under his skin.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, the first-time Emmy nominee reflected on SNL's most-watched season in 23 years and said, "I knew something exciting was happening because of the election, and we were going to try to cover it as best we could. Everybody's like, 'Oh, isn't it exciting?' But to us it just felt normal."

Asked if it still felt like business as usual when Trump started bashing the show on Twitter, Jones replied, "We loved that. Of course we loved it. You just want to see him turn red and orange, all the colors."

Jones also discussed the inspiration for her sketch about wanting to play Trump.

"Everybody else was imitating Trump, so I was just like, I want to see if I can do it," she said. "And I knew it would be funny. Honestly, the whole concept was that Lorne [Michaels, the show's creator] wasn't going to let me do it. So we wrote the sketch like he was going to say no, and he loved it."

Elsewhere in the interview, Jones weighed in on Emmy recognition, online trolls, working with younger cast mates, and of course her beloved Game of Thrones.

"I love shows like that, period," she said. "It's got dragons and castles, so many ins and outs and you don't know how they're going to connect them all together. Everybody knows, when it's on, they don't mess with me. Because it takes me two and a half hours to watch it. I have to pause it. I have to cry. I have to scream. I have to yell at characters. It's a process."

Read Jones' full interview at The New York Times.