Oprah Winfrey stopped by The Late Show last night and flipped the interview to urge host Stephen Colbert to reflect on the late-night show’s impending end.
The visit started as a conventional interview, marking Winfrey’s fourth sit-down with Colbert. But in the midst of sharing an anecdote about Paul McCartney, Winfrey asked the host, “How are you feeling about the whole thing?”
“Don’t go Oprah on me now…,” Colbert replied before inviting Winfrey to switch seats with him. After settling down behind his desk, Winfrey acknowledged, “This is so exciting.”
“So I am wondering, as you stand here at the threshold of what’s about to be done and what you’re stepping into, what do you feel like, in this moment, you most want to release?” Winfrey asked.
“What do I want to release?” Colbert asked. She clarified, “To let go of.” Colbert responded that he didn’t want to let go of anything yet. “I still have a white-knuckle grip on all these people who I love, who I’ve worked with all these years, including those people over there,” Colbert said, pointing to his crew and his house band. He added, “And the audience, obviously.”
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“When you and I are talking to each other, there’s a third person in the conversation, and it’s the audience—and they are doing their job better than you and I can,” Colbert said. “If I’m asking questions, I want to make sure I’m hitting all the questions. And you might be saying, ‘I want to hit all the things I want to answer.’ But there is something else going on besides what we are doing. The audience is very pure in their engagement in our conversation.”
He continued, “If there’s somebody I need to talk to on a corporate level [and] the conversation is not going to go that well, I will ask my assistant and someone else to sit at the desk across from me so I have an ‘audience’ to hear me have the phone call, so that I will say what I actually feel. Because the audience makes me do it more than I will make me do it.”
Winfrey concluded her “interview” with Colbert by sharing a sweet farewell. ” I just want to say to you, thank you so much,” she said. “Thank you so much for holding the space for laughter.”
The Late Show will come to an end on May 21. CBS announced the cancellation last July, citing financial issues at the network. Many of the show’s guests have recently been paying tribute to Colbert, who has hosted for over a decade. Last month, Jimmy Fallon performed a song in honour of Colbert, and John Lithgow read him a poem.
From Rolling Stone US
