Nikki’s Glaser isn’t playing around when it comes to preparing for her Golden Globes hosting gig.
“93,” Glaser, 40, told E! News on the red carpet ahead of the awards show of how many times she practiced her monologue. “[Tonight] will be my 94th time telling some version of this. I mean, it’s still changed even from the last time I told it until now, so we’re constantly making edits, trying to top jokes, trying to strike the right note and tone for the evening. But a lot of work has gone into it.”
While she’s practiced her set nearly 100 times, Glaser wants to be clear: there’s a lot of room for improv, and anything can happen at the 82nd Annual Golden Globes, which air on CBS on Sunday, January 5, at 8:00 p.m. ET.
“I don’t want people to think, ‘Oh she’s just reciting some monologue.’ I practice so much, so that when I get up there, I’m off-book and I can just be in it,” she said. “And then that’s when stuff’s gonna start coming out that wasn’t planned. And so now I know it so well that I can be myself up there.”
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While this is her first time hosting the Globes, the comedian is no stranger to commanding an audience: Glaser went viral late last year for her performance on Netflix’s The Roast of Tom Brady, and she has been performing stand-up comedy for over two decades.
“I am feeling so ready,” she said on the red carpet. “I can’t wait to perform. The nerves aren’t there yet. I just got done with rehearsal, I feel so comfortable with it. I just am like, ‘God I can’t wait to tell this to a room full of people.’ It’s going to be so much fun.”
Included in that room of people are heartthrobs and 2025 nominees Timothée Chalamet and Glen Powell, who Glaser thinks might “set off something new in my head” when she sees them in the audience during the show.
“[Glen] is going to be in the back and he has to wear sunglasses so he can’t make eye contact with me because it will throw me, I need to stay dry,” Glaser joked about Powell, 36, who is nominated for Best Actor in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy, for his performance in Hit Man. “These people don’t talk to me outside of a setting like this, so this is my time to talk to them, for them to look at me. Not that they think they’re better than me, it’s just that I don’t run into these people a lot, so I’m standing up there, and it’s blowing my mind that Angelina Jolie has to listen to me talk for nine minutes.”
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Included in Glaser’s 93 practice rounds were nine performances in and around Los Angeles over just a few days leading up to the show.
“Not every host does that,” she told The Hollywood Reporter of her preparation on Thursday, January 2. “I’m lucky enough to be a comedian that can go and find these rehearsal spaces in front of a live audience and I trust my audience members to not leak jokes to tell anyone.”
She continued: “it’s been a really collaborative process. I go on stage and I just say, ‘Hey guys, do you mind if I run my set?’ and everyone’s so excited. They feel like they’re part of this interesting, secretive process because they are. And I just go, ‘If you laugh at a joke tonight, and then you hear that same joke Sunday night when you watch the Globes, you can literally be like, ‘I told her to do that joke,’ because you did!’”
