We’ve been crushing on Kate McKinnon ever since she played the role of Jillian Holtzman in the all-female version of Ghostbusters.
Alongside Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, and Melissa McCarthy, McKinnon pushed her role– Egon Spenger, which the late Harold Ramis played in the 1984 version– to even greater heights.
Still, it’s no secret the multi-talented comic has been around for a long time. The role she played in the Ghostbusters remake was just her breakthrough waiting to happen.
Likewise, though McKinnon values her personal space and hasn’t made her presence felt on social media platforms, she’s an out and proud lesbian.
Kate McKinnon’s early years
Born in 1984, Kate McKinnon Berthold grew up in Sea Cliff, New York to parents Laura Campbell and architect Michael Thomas Berthold (who died when she was 18 years old).
Multi-talented as a child, Kate learned how to the piano, cello, and guitar.
She was a theatre major in Columbia University where she was one of the founders of Tea Party, a comedy group whose inclinations were on musical improv comedy.
As a college student, she was part of Prangstgrup, a group that made videos of well-thought out college pranks.
Kate McKinnon on TV
She joined Logo TV’s The Big Gay Sketch in 2007 where she became a regular cast member for three seasons.
Soon, she was doing live sketch comedies in comedy bars in New York and voice-overs for The Venture Bros., Robotomy, and Ugly Americans.
However, it was in Saturday Night Live where McKinnon proved she wasn’t just a dime-a-dozen comic.
Debuting in 2012, she came up with dozens of characters, such as Olya Povlatsky, the opinionated Russian woman who appears on the Weekend Update.
She also did celebrity impressions, the most popular of which were Justin Bieber, Ellen Degeneres, and Hillary Clinton.
Shauna Miller of The Atlantic once wrote the following about Kate McKinnon’s depiction of Justin Beiber’s Calvin Klein ad on SNL: “McKinnon manages to present all of this as just a joke, totally nonpolitical.”
“It’s not that simple, of course. And that’s a feat only the best comedians can manage, one she pulls off with swagger and a barely contained smirk.”
Kate Mckinnon: Award-winning actress
Since 2013, McKinnon has been cited for her comedy performance.
Entertainment Weekly nominated her for Best Supporting Actress, Comedy in 2013. She was also nominated for an Emmy in 2014, and again in 2015.
In 2014, she won Best Supporting Actress, TV at the American Comedy Award. Likewise, she won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy series in 2016, the first for an SNL member to do so.
But more than the awards, it’s her fearless brand of comedy that has made the world fall in lover with her, and us with the rest of the world.