Colbert Opens Up About What He’ll Miss Most as Late Show Ends

Stephen Colbert is in full reflection mode. With The Late Show with Stephen Colbert just days away from its May 21 finale, the host sat down with his old Strike Force Five crew — Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers and John Oliver — for a reunion episode of their podcast, and the conversation got personal, funny and more than a little sentimental.

The quintet hadn’t been together like this since the writers’ strike brought them all to the same table, and this time the occasion was bittersweet: a send-off for the man who built one of late night’s most politically sharp and genuinely warm hours of television. Over the course of the conversation, Colbert opened up about what he’ll carry with him — and what he could barely handle while it was happening.

The Guest He Couldn’t Look At

Jimmy Kimmel, never one to let a moment of vulnerability go unexplored, asked Colbert whether he’d ever had a guest so attractive it became a genuine problem. Colbert had an answer ready.

“I’ll tell you who I did not expect to be wildly attracted to,” he told the group. “I did not know what to do with my eyeballs when Michelle Williams was on for the first time.”

Williams — the Dawson’s Creek alum who has since become one of the most acclaimed actresses of her generation — first appeared on the show in 2019 to promote the FX miniseries Fosse/Verdon. She returned earlier this year to discuss Dying for Sex, the Hulu limited series for which she won a Golden Globe. But it was that first visit that apparently left Colbert completely undone.

“She sat down across from me and I went, ‘F—k, what is wrong with my head? I’d better not look directly at her for this entire interview,’” he said. He added that he finds her “so beautiful” — not just in a conventional sense, but something about her “vibe” and “face” that he genuinely didn’t see coming.

Williams wasn’t alone on Colbert’s list. He also copped to a long-standing “Rachel Weisz problem.” “When Rachel Weisz would be on, I would leave the building for fear I would say something stupid,” he said. Rebecca Ferguson also made the cut. And then there was Andrew Garfield.

“Andrew Garfield, he is so attractive,” Colbert laughed, as Kimmel immediately pounced: “And you kissed him!” Colbert clarified — or tried to: “Or he kissed me. We did get our hands tangled in each other’s hair. It was really nice.” The smooch happened during a January 2017 episode, and it apparently left an impression on both of them.

The on-screen kiss theme wasn’t just a podcast talking point this week. On Tuesday night’s Late Show, Colbert shared kisses with both Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Pedro Pascal. Louis-Dreyfus, after hearing Colbert’s list of past on-camera kisses — which includes Sally Field, Helen Mirren, Allison Janney and Jeff Daniels — made clear she wanted in. Pascal needed even less convincing. He sat down on the couch and immediately pointed to his lips.

“I got jealous,” Pascal quipped. Colbert’s response? “No need! Anytime. These lips will soon be free.”

What He’ll Actually Miss

The laughs were easy. The harder part of the Strike Force Five conversation was Colbert getting honest about loss — specifically, the kind that doesn’t get talked about when a show ends.

“I think one of the things I’m going to miss most is young people who are good at their jobs,” he said. “And who you met, and they were first out of college or something like that. Like, I was talking to one of my producers the other day. He’s worked for me for 21 years, and he started working for me when he was 21.”

“Unbelievable,” Seth Meyers responded. And it is. Twenty-one years of someone’s life, shaped in part by the rhythm of a late-night show that’s now coming to an end.

Colbert has been candid since CBS made its announcement last year that the show’s cancellation blindsided him. “I have had a great relationship with CBS. It’s one of the reasons why this was so surprising and so shocking that there was no preamble to this,” he said at the time. The network called it “purely a financial decision” — the show was reportedly costing around $40 million a year in losses with a 200-person crew — but the timing raised eyebrows. The cancellation came just days after Colbert called his parent company Paramount’s $16 million settlement with President Donald Trump a “big fat bribe,” given that Paramount was simultaneously seeking federal approval for its merger with Skydance Media. CBS staffers told The Independent they viewed it as a continuation of what they called the “Trump shakedown.” CBS maintained it was about the bottom line.

A Farewell Two Weeks in the Making

Whatever the reason, the show is ending — and Colbert is doing it right. His final two weeks have been stacked with guests: Barack Obama, Tom Hanks, Hamilton star Christopher Jackson, and David Letterman, the man who held that desk before him. Obama’s return visit on May 13 featured the former president taking on Colbert’s rapid-fire “Questionert” segment, weeks after a May 5 episode filmed at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago that generated headlines of its own.

During that earlier visit, Colbert joked that people had been telling him to run for president after the show ends. Obama laughed, said Colbert had “the hair” for it, and offered a characteristically precise non-endorsement: “I think that you could perform significantly better than some folks that we’ve seen.” The White House responded with a statement calling Obama “a classless moron” — which, in the current climate, probably felt like a badge of honor to everyone in the Ed Sullivan Theater.

After the Late Show, Colbert’s next chapter is already set. In March, Peter Jackson announced that Colbert — a lifelong Tolkien devotee — will write a new Lord of the Rings film, currently titled The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past. For a man who once spent 20 minutes grilling Ian McKellen about Middle-earth lore on live television, it’s a genuinely perfect next act.

His fellow late-night hosts are marking the moment in their own way. Jimmy Kimmel announced that Jimmy Kimmel Live! is going dark all week — airing reruns “out of deference” to Colbert’s sendoff, as he told LateNighter. Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers are doing the same, running repeats while both appeared on The Late Show Monday. Kimmel also confirmed his ABC show will not produce a new episode on May 21, the night of the finale itself.

The Late Show franchise itself will go dark after May 21 — 33 years after it first launched. CBS has announced that Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen will take over the 11:35 p.m. slot. It’s a quiet end to something that was never quiet.

“These lips will soon be free,” Colbert told Pedro Pascal. But the rest of him — the wit, the warmth, the staff he watched grow up, the guests he could barely look at — that’s going to take longer to let go.