Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert appeared on each other’s shows last night, using both opportunities to reflect on the recent chaos that has befallen late-night TV.
Colbert sat down on Jimmy Kimmel Live, which is taping in Brooklyn this week, for an interview about his show being cancelled and winning an Emmy. During the interview, Colbert recalled the moment he found out The Late Show had been axed by CBS.
The host explained to Kimmel that the news was first delivered to him in a lengthy phone call with his manager, James Dixon, who withheld the information for a few days while Colbert was on vacation. As soon as he got home, Colbert told his wife, Evie, what had transpired.
“Evie said, ‘Are you going to tell your staff tomorrow?’” Colbert recalled. “I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I will tell them after the summer break. Maybe I’ll tell them in September.’ She said, ‘You’re going to tell them tomorrow.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so. I just don’t think I’m up for it.’ And then she goes, ‘I am coming to work with you tomorrow because I think you are telling your staff.’”
He continued, “We get into the building. I go up in the elevator. I walk through the offices. By the time I get to my offices, I have sweat through my shirt. Because I didn’t want to know anything my staff didn’t know.”
He decided to wait until after the episode they were working on had finished taping before gathering the entire staff. He asked the stage manager to hold the audience so he could go back on stage and deliver the news.
“I was so nervous about doing it right,” Colbert said. “Because there was nothing on the prompter, I was doing it off the cuff. I fucked up twice and I had to restart. And the audience thought it was a bit. They started going, ‘You can do it. Come on, Steve. You can do it.’ Because I always messed up on the sentence that told them what was happening. And then I got to the sentence that told them what was happening and they didn’t laugh. They didn’t laugh. That is it. So that’s how I did it.”
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Kimmel then recounted how he found out that The Late Show was ending. “My wife and kids, we were in a protest march,” Kimmel noted. “The No Kings protest march. We were out there with our signs and I got this text. I was just absolutely shocked because it’s not right.”
“It’s their ball and they can take it home if they want,” Colbert replied. “They don’t have any balls, Stephen,” Kimmel said. “Let’s be honest.”
During his appearance on The Late Show, Kimmel reflected on his recent suspension and how he learned that ABC had pulled him. The host described the experience as an “emotional roller coaster” and “very strange.”
“It was about 3 p.m.. We tape our show at 4:30. I’m in my office, typing away as I usually do. I get a phone call, it’s ABC. They say they want to talk to me. This is unusual,” Kimmel explained to Colbert. “As far as I knew, they didn’t even know I was doing a show previous to this, so I have like five people who work in my office with me so the only private place to go is the bathroom.”
He continued, “So I go into the bathroom. And I’m on the phone with the ABC executives and they say, ‘Listen, we wanna take the temperature down. We’re concerned about what you’re gonna say tonight and we decided that the best route is to take the show off the air tonight.’ I said, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ and they said, ‘Well, we think it’s a good idea.’ And then there was a vote and I lost the vote. So I put my pants back on and I walked out to my office and I called in some of the executive producers, and there were about nine people in there, and I said, ‘They’re pulling the show off the air.’”
He recalled thinking, “I thought, ‘That it, it’s over.’ I was like, ‘I’m never coming back on the air.’” He recalled that his audience was already in their seats for that day’s taping “ready for the show.” The evening’s guests and the audience were sent home, and Kimmel said his journey out of El Capitan Theatre, where Jimmy Kimmel Live is filmed, was especially crazy.
“I’m followed by 20 paparazzi cars, TMZ people jumping in front of me on the way home,” he said. “We’re just trying to get to the house and we’re like, ‘Should we be going to our house?’ There are two helicopters following us home. I hadn’t had makeup on yet, so my bald spot was not painted in. This is something I did not want America to see.”
He described the suspension as being “like a DUI in L.A., three days in jail where I couldn’t say anything.” He added, “I just had to sit quiet and make a lot of phone calls and take a lot of phone calls… I did hear from literally everyone I have ever met.”
During the interview, Colbert asked Kimmel if his younger self could have imagined “the President of the United States would be celebrating your unemployment?”
“I mean, that son of a bitch,” Kimmel said. “No, I never imagined that we’d ever have a president like this, and I hope we don’t ever have another president like this again. I never even imagined there would ever be a situation in which the president of our country was celebrating hundreds of Americans losing their jobs. But somebody who took pleasure in that—that to me is the absolute opposite of what a leader of this country is supposed to be.”
From Rolling Stone US
