JULIE KLAUSNER: Your impression style has more to do with just creating a character than mimicking the person precisely.
MAYA RUDOLPH: I think that’s exactly what it’s like. Like Whitney Houston. It’s a character. The way I do her, it’s not a real person anymore. Sometimes when you’re doing an impression of a person based on something they just did, it feels kind of mean-spirited, like you’re attacking somebody. As opposed to when we did Donatella Versace: we created a world where she was capable of anything. We made her this weird vampire. We had a talk show where she was in the bathtub, and then she got electrocuted—and she loved it.
