Broadway's Laura Benanti Talks Spot-On Melania Trump Impersonations

In a new interview with USA Today, Laura Benanti discusses her recent appearances on CBS's LATE SHOW on which she does a spot-on impersonation of Melania Trump. The Tony winner is scheduled to appear on tonight's episode of 'COLBERT' (airing 11:35 ET/PT), however it remains uncertain if she will once again channel the First Lady.

Explaining how the impersonation came about, Benanti explains, "I was doing a show called SHE LOVES ME on Broadway, and I was on the Colbert show as a guest promoting that, and he pointed out my resemblance to her. They held up a side-by-side picture of the two of us. Then I just did two seconds of my facial impression. That was over and done with. I didn't think about it again. And then, after the Republican National Convention when she did the (controversial) speech, I woke up the next morning to a flurry of emails and phone calls asking if I would come in and do an impersonation for a sketch. I had never heard her talk before. I don't think many people had. I was actually five hours away in Delaware for my grandmother's 92nd birthday, so my mom and my sister drove me three hours to a train. The train was two hours and I just basically obsessively watched her speech the entire time and then we went live that night with the impression."

The talented actress jokes that her dream sketch would involve a "sort of Risky Business style video where Melania is sliding through (their Manhattan apartment) high-fiving all the help because she's thrilled that he's gone."

Despite her humorous take on Ms. Trump, Benanti insists that she always wants to maintain a light-hearted tone to her LATE SHOW appearances. "I don't ever want it to feel like I'm being mean-spirited toward her or that I'm aggressively insinuating that she's not intelligent," she explains. "She's a model, so I play up the vampiness. I have no beef with her at all. Her husband is a different story."

Read the interview in full here and check out Benanti's Melania impersonation below:

Laura Benanti most recently appeared on Broadway in SHE LOVES ME. Among her many other Broadway credits are WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, GYPSY, NINE and INTO THE WOODS.