‘Daily Show’s Jaboukie Young-White Plays Jussie Smollett In Fake Movie Trailer

The Daily Show‘s Jaboukie Young-White has been angling for days to replace Jussie Smollett on Empire, but now he’s taken his ambitions to a new level: In a faux-commercial for a fake (but inevitable) Lifetime movie, Young-White plays Smollett himself.

The tagline: “Coming this fall… The story of a poorly staged hate crime that rocked a nation: Jussie’s Lie.”

The Daily Show tweeted the trailer for Jussie’s Lie today (watch it below), and it’s everything fans of fake Lifetime movies could want. Young-White recreates such pivotal scenes from the scandal as Smollett complaining about the insufficiently large stash of cash he gets paid for Empire, his creation of the phony death threat letter (“I’m Going To Kill Me”), his plotting with his Nigerian work-out buddies, his late-night Subway snack (“Mmmm, I love eating sandwiches at 2 a.m.!”), and finally the big moment, when the script-reading brothers confront Smollett on that cold, cold Chicago street (“Aren’t you that actor that is underpaid on the show Empire, who is very famous…and gay?”).

Earlier this week, Young-White shared his thoughts about Smollett with Daily Show host Trevor Noah (watch that one below, too), offering the sage observation about the use of the Nigerian brothers as MAGA supporters: “You can’t just cast black people as racist white people,” Young-White said. “This isn’t Hamilton.”

Here’s the Jussie’s Lie trailer, followed by Young-White’s previous discussion of the situation with Noah.