First Lady Melania Trump—or at least the Laura Benanti version—appeared on Wednesday’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to discuss her recently released documentary.
Melania was directed by Brett Ratner, who was the subject of sexual assault allegations during the #MeToo era, and as such has not helmed a feature since 2014. The 104-minute docu hit theaters Friday and had a $7 million opening weekend.
That tally marks the best opening for a documentary of its kind in 14 years, but it’s thus far a drop in the bucket against the project’s $75 million budget.
Amazon ponied up an exorbitant $40 million for the rights alone (a good chunk of which went to Melania herself), and spent another $35 mil in marketing. (For comparison’s sake, RBG, the 2018 doc about Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, cost one mil to make and $3 million to market. And it actually netted Oscar nods.)
What is Melania about, though?
“Some have called this a documentary. It is not,” the real First Lady said at a premiere event last week, in footage cued up by Colbert. “My film is a very deliberate act of authorship, inviting you to witness events and emotions through a window of rich imagery. It is a created experience that offers perspectives, insights, and moments that only few have seen.”
To which Colbert responded, like us all: What?
Ergo, the latest visit from Benanti’s Melania Trump.
“You must be very busy,” Colbert acknowledged up front. “I know you had a big release last weekend that everyone is talking about.”
“Oh, Stephen, no! I am not here to talk about the Epstein files!” bristled Melania.
She proceeded to describe “Melania: The Lady: The Movie: The Motion Picture” as a “fil-em” that offers “a deliberate window of tapestries draped over a rich bed frame of insights that are so authorship, few have ever seen it and even less have wanted to.”
“That is so many words,” Colbert noted. “But can you actually tell us what the movie is about?”
“Oh, it’s about $28 million in my pocket!” the First Lady cheered while making it rain. “Cha-ching!”
Melania further classified the docu as, “just like me, a very creepy mystery. I play ‘Melania,’ the third wife of an aging billionaire, and I am moving into a spooky old mansion called the White House where I definitely live and sleep with my husband. Wink!”
Asked about what Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” which she sings along to in Melania, is her favorite song, she says, “it brings a smile to my face every time I look at Eric and think ‘The kiiiiid is not my son.'”
Other spicy exchanges:
- Colbert: “I saw your husband attended your opening?”
Melania: “Oh, Stephen, my husband has not attended my opening in years,” after which she sought a high-five.
- Colbert: “I understand it hasn’t done well overseas and was even entirely pulled out of South Africa.”
Melania: “They should not have done that. The only person that should have pulled out in South Africa is Elon Musk’s dad! Boom goes the rocket ship!”
Colbert wrapped things up by congratulation the First Lady “on your film being a movie,” after which Melania shared that she had just received “the fil-em world’s most prestigious award: the FIFA Oscar for ‘Be Best’ actress!”
Watch the full segment above.
She makes her look real awful!😈👍
Laura Benanti is talented, but these Melania bits they’ve done on Late Show all these years always seemed a little…hacky??
I dunno…to me, the scripted comedy bits they did on this show always paled to the ones they did on The Colbert Report.
Well of course it pales to you because it’s NOT The Colbert Report; comedy is subjective of course but I do understand relying on real-life figures to make satirical jabs is nothin new. And I don’t expect Benanti to pull a Colbert pundit of staying in character every day for a whole decade (and we know how Colbert doing that took a mental toll on him)
But if I can give benefit of the doubt, I’d rather have the Melania bits sparingly and spaced out so it doesn’t feel tiring~ However, with the end of the Late Show fast approaching, we are definitely being robbed of this amazing impersonation and Idk how many more appearances we’ll have left of Laura-Melania 🥺
Seeing as how the current writing/producing/creative staff is more or less the same as the one on The Colbert Report, Ol33 has a valid criticism about the strength of the scripted bits despite they being two different shows.
Yeeeeeah, unfortunately I gotta agree that the sketches (at least the non-political ones) they did on the CBS show were really hit or miss, wheres on the old show there rarely was a misfire. But, the CBS show had consistently good-to-strong scripted political stuff, so there’s that. Regardless, I’m going to miss Colbert in (argh!) less than four months.