Stephen Colbert revealed how he found out that The Late Show was being canceled in his first interview since the news broke in July.
Colbert, 61, appeared on the Tuesday, September 30, episode of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which aired simultaneously with Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show featuring Colbert interviewing Jimmy Kimmel, 57, about his show’s recent suspension.
Colbert said he got the news from his and Kimmel’s mutual manager, James “Baby Doll” Dixon, in mid-July after returning from a Greek vacation.
“He said, ‘Hey, baby, I just need to talk to you for 15 minutes after the show on Wednesday,’” Colbert shared with Kimmel. “This was on the 16th of July. Five minutes on the phone with Baby Doll is an hour, so 15 minutes in person, what the hell is this about? So I say to [my wife] Evie, ‘I’ll be home a little bit later. I got to talk to Baby.’ I come home two and a half hours later, and I walk into the apartment, and she goes, ‘What happened? You get canceled?’ I said, ‘Yes, I did.’”
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Colbert said that his manager was already informed about the cancellation by CBS before he shared the news. “He didn’t want to ruin my vacation ‘cause they told him a couple of days before I got home,” Colbert said.
“I was far out at sea. I was drowning my entire life in spanakopita and Greek rosé, it was fantastic,” he went on to quip.
Colbert broke the news to his staff, studio audience and viewers during the July 17 taping, though he said he was initially reluctant to tell his crew.
“By the time I get to my offices, I have sweat through my shirt ‘cause I didn’t wanna know anything my staff didn’t know,” he said. “But we couldn’t do a show if I told them because everybody would be bummed out, and I’d be bummed out, so I only told my executive producer. I did the whole show and then when I said goodnight, to the audience, I said, ‘OK, nobody leave because we’ve got one more act of the show.’ I wanted to record at the top of the show that we had been canceled.”
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After recording the show, Colbert shared the news with his team and then went back out on stage to record his solemn speech that opened that night’s episode.
“I was so nervous about doing it right because there was nothing on the [tele]prompter,” he recalled. “I was just speaking off the cuff. … I f***ed up twice and had to restart. The audience thought it was a bit, and they started going, ‘You can do it!’”
Kimmel, for his part, consoled his friend and late-night comrade by saying, “I was just absolutely shocked because it’s not right.”
“That’s nice of you to say. It’s their ball and they can take it home if they want,” Colbert responded, which prompted Kimmel to clap back: “They don’t have any balls, Stephen. Let’s be honest.”
Kimmel, who is taping a week of shows in Brooklyn, New York, this week, dropped by the Ed Sullivan Theater on Tuesday to be interviewed on The Late Show. He revealed that he thought Jimmy Kimmel Live! was “never coming back” amid the show’s controversial six-day suspension last month.
