Sarah Cooper: 'Trump has bigger fish to fry than me'

Sophie Heawood@heawood
Sun 22 Nov 2020 03.00 EST

Lockdown videos of Sarah Cooper lip-syncing Donald Trump made her a Twitter sensation. Now the comedian is working with the likes of Helen Mirren and Whoopi Goldberg. She reveals how she ditched Silicon Valley to follow her dreams


You might think the only sort of person who gets famous on TikTok is a teenager caked in bronzing makeup busting out robotic dance moves, not a middle-aged married woman with an economics degree, despairing at her government. But 2020 has brought many surprises, and Sarah Cooper is perhaps the most unlikely of all of them: an American comedian who has appeared out of nowhere and made millions of us actually want to listen to Donald Trump. That is, as long as his voice is coming out of her mouth, in the videos where she lip-syncs and mimes along to his rambling speeches.

“I hate him so much,” she says, smiling calmly as she talks to me over video from New York, where she lives, “but he has provided my greatest material.” Such as the time he imagined, out loud, all the lovely health benefits that might come from imbibing disinfectant. Cooper turns her despair into hilarity when she moves her mouth in perfect timing to his words while looking exactly like herself: a black woman who has never voted Republican in her life.

The videos migrated from TikTok to Twitter, where Cooper rapidly amassed 2.4m followers, leading to her making a new Netflix comedy special called Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine. The title is a joke, as she plays a character with the same name as herself – a news presenter who is feigning happiness while the world disintegrates around her. But in Cooper’s own career, everything now is fine, a fact which is still making her pinch herself. Her show has an all-star supporting cast, including Helen Mirren, Whoopi Goldberg and Winona Ryder, who all wanted to get involved with her work. “I’m like, it’s… This wasn’t my life. Very shortly ago,” she says, visibly dumbfounded by her newfound fame, “this was nowhere close to my life.”

Cooper is 42 and was born in Jamaica. Her family moved to the US when she was three, and she later graduated in economics from the University of Maryland, encouraged by parents who thought she should make some money, rather than taking the risk of pursuing her performing dreams. She also studied design, another sensible decision that helped her get jobs at Yahoo and Google in user experience, only to find that Silicon Valley was all about pursuing your dreams. Allegedly.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/nov/22/sarah-cooper-comedian-trump-politics-netflix-bigger-fish-to-fry