Actor and comedian Chris Wilson poses for a portrait at the W Hotel in Toronto, on Dec. 15, 2023. Wilson’s portrayals of Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre on This Hour Has 22 Minutes have received acclaim and gone viral.Duane Cole/The Globe and Mail
Though all millennials are currently up against it in the housing market, Chris Wilson is in a unique damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.
After a few years as a writer and featured performer on This Hour Has 22 Minutes, the 38-year-old Victoria-born sketch comedian was elevated to full-time cast member this season – based in part on a pitch-perfect impression of Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the opposition.
As the pol who does not want to be known as P.P. has risen in profile and in the polls, so too had Wilson’s indispensability to the long-running fake-news and sketch-comedy show, which is riding a renewed wave of vitality owing to an expanded reach on social-media sites such as TikTok; now all Wilson needs to clinch that house down payment is a Conservative majority.
“I need to do a few more seasons on the show to save up,” Wilson, a rather earnest fellow with a blank-slate face off-screen, says during a recent interview in Toronto. “The houses are like $600,000 and up – close to a million now, for downtown Halifax.”
Of course, the particular property-ladder pickle Wilson finds himself in is this: If Poilievre does get elected in the next election, the CBC is in peril of being defunded per his platform. Then, Wilson’s housing dream could die even if the Conservatives’ much-debated plan to make homes more affordable, you know, actually works.
Call it a catch-22 Minutes.
But it’s all the more reason to enjoy Wilson’s spot-on Poilievre while it lasts. He’s nailed the deep nasally voice and the cocky yet nerdy body language and was recently mistaken for the real deal by Poilievre’s followers while trying to ambush him in character at one of his rallies in Windsor, N.S.
Whether it’s a function of Canadian public broadcaster budgets, or just that Canadian comedy ensembles are more representative of the country’s demographics these days than party leaders, Wilson is also playing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in sketches. (The other white male regular on 22 Minutes, Mark Critch, is better at playing blowhards like Donald Trump.)
This double duty is a funny position for a funny man previously best known for his inventive work on the mainstage at Second City Toronto (he played a hilarious laptop in one revue) and as half of the long-running Fringe-touring double act Peter n Chris (with Peter Carlone).
His main impressions previously were of celebs such as Jay Baruchel and Ryan Reynolds rather than cabinet ministers – and he isn’t exactly a political junkie, says 22 Minutes head writer Jordan Foisy.
Indeed, when Foisy first asked Wilson to try his hand at Poilievre – for a sketch inspired by the reality show Love Is Blind – the comedian hadn’t heard of the member of Parliament for Carleton; so, Foisy told him to just do “nasally angry nerd.”
While that scene never made it past the table read, it did lead Wilson to research and refine his impression just in time for Poilievre to win the Conservative leadership race last season. He noticed though that Poilievre is actually a baritone – and then, after a comedy pal casually commented that Eugene Levy might do a good Poilievre, he added in a little Levy to his portrayal. “My hook was just like saying, ‘Justin, Justin, Justin,’ ” Wilson recalls, transforming himself into Poilievre as he says it.
Foisy says an approach to Poilievre that is less political than character-based has helped Wilson’s version take on a life of its own, comparing it to Dana Carvey’s beloved buffoon version of George H.W. Bush on Saturday Night Live.
As for where that’s happening it hasn’t primarily been on CBC on Tuesday evenings, but in the same place Poilievre thrives as a politician: social media, not mainstream media.
When Wilson gets recognized in the street, he says: “They’re like, ‘You play Pierre on TikTok.’ ”
A couple seasons ago, Lizzy Perkins, then the new social-media manager for 22 Minutes, started putting sketches up on TikTok where they immediately found the mass audience that’s slowly been evaporating on conventional television. “Our second video ever that we posted had two million views within three days,” says Perkins, of a pot-related sketch that now has more than 45 million views. “So, really instantly, I could tell that it was going to reach an audience beyond my wildest expectations.”
The 22 Minutes TikTok account is now is on the verge of one million followers – which is a couple hundred thousand more than the long-running show’s decade-old Facebook fan page has, and more than five times as many as subscribers as the show has amassed on YouTube over 15 years.
That’s a particularly exceptional number for a Canadian show given Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show – internationally known American comedy brands who also fake the news – have around seven million followers on the platform.
On CBC itself, comparatively, 22 Minutes has an average minute audience of 401,000, according to the public broadcaster, which declined to provide the show’s additional numbers on its streamer CBC Gem.
It’s 22 Minutes’ non-political sketches, of course, that go the most viral online with a larger potential audience: One earlier this season called DeMarcus – in which a white couple (Wilson and Stacey McGunnigle) try to register that name for their newborn child with a Black nurse (Aba Amuquandoh) – has racked up more than 36 million views on TikTok alone.
But Wilson’s political impressions – which I first stumbled upon on his Instagram last season having followed the comedian in his Second City days, and which led me back to a 22 Minutes that seems to have regained much of sharpness – are getting serious views too. Since the beginning of the 31st season in September, his videos involving Poilievre or Trudeau have collectively earned more than 5.1 million social-media views cross-platform, according to Perkins.
Online viewers seem particularly tickled by scenes where both of his political leaders interact with each other thanks to green-screen technology, or quick cuts back and forth from one side of the House of Commons to the other.
While his Trudeau is strong – he’s found a good comedy angle on him this season, portraying him as an easily irritated divorced dad – it involves a fair bit of transformation: a wig, contouring of his face, a device placed on his neck to pull his skin back and give him a stronger jaw.
It’s a different story with the leader of the opposition. “To play Pierre Poilievre, they literally like just darken my hair and do nothing else,” Wilson notes. Indeed, even the comedian has occasionally looked at thumbnails of Poilievre videos online and mistaken them for his own parodies.
The success of his portrayal does have something to do with being watched on a phone rather than on television – it’s the right medium to satirize the man whom the Hub, an online conservative magazine, recently posited might be “the first influencer in Canadian politics.”
On the other hand, there is no doubt a symbiotic relationship between the impressions Wilson’s impression gets and the clicks the Conservative Leader gets from fans and detractors alike with his own oddly charismatic videos – whether his recent owning of a B.C. journalist by chomping an apple through poorly planned interview questions, or those straight-to-camera rants where he talks to “Justin” about inflation. (To complete the circle, those walk-and-talks could be said to borrow an aesthetic from former 22 Minutes cast member Rick Mercer’s similar segments.)
Wilson sees Poilievre as much more on top of his own image online. “When Trudeau’s videos go viral, it’s not in his control – it’s like he’s been caught being dumb, singing karaoke at an inappropriate time,” he says. “Whereas Pierre is like, just seems in control of it, you know.”
J. Kelly Nestruck