Colbert Gets Real About Late Show Guests Who Left Him Starstruck

Stephen Colbert is spending his final weeks on the Late Show the way he’s spent the last 11 years — being disarmingly honest, surprisingly funny, and occasionally a little unhinged in the best possible way. And this week, that combination produced one of the most genuinely charming confessions of his entire run.

During a special reunion episode of the Strike Force Five podcast — the group he formed with Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver — Colbert was asked if he’d ever interviewed a guest so attractive it became genuinely distracting. He didn’t hesitate.

“I’ll tell you who I did not expect to be wildly attracted to,” he told his fellow hosts. “I didn’t know what to do with myself. I like this person’s work, but I never thought of them as like a bombshell. I did not know what to do with my eyeballs when Michelle Williams was on for the first time.”

Williams first appeared on the Late Show in 2016, promoting the Broadway show Blackbird. And apparently, from the moment she sat down across from him, Colbert was a mess.

“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 recalled. “There was something about her vibe, her face, everything. She’s so beautiful.”

Williams has returned to the Late Show several times since — most recently in April 2025 to promote Dying for Sex, the Hulu limited series for which she won a Golden Globe. She also appeared in 2019 for Fosse/Verdon. Colbert, for his part, reportedly recited poetry in her honor during that last visit, which tracks perfectly for a man who was apparently barely keeping it together in her presence from the start.

He’s Had Other ‘Problems’ Too

Williams wasn’t the only one to leave Colbert tongue-tied. He confessed to a full-blown “Rachel Weisz problem” — one that predates the Late Show entirely.

“When Rachel Weisz would be on The Daily Show, I would leave the building for fear that I would say something stupid,” he said. “I was afraid I would go” — switching to a comically high-pitched voice — “‘Hi! You were great in The Constant Gardener.’”

He also named Rebecca Ferguson and Andrew Garfield as guests who left him awestruck. The Garfield mention prompted Kimmel to remind him, on air, that he’d actually kissed the Spider-Man star during a January 2017 episode of the Late Show.

“Or he kissed me,” Colbert clarified, with zero regret. “We did get our hands tangled in each other’s hair. It was really nice.”

For the record, Colbert — who married his wife Evelyn in 1993 after meeting her in a cinema line in 1990 — has always been clear about where his heart sits. “There is absolutely, bar none, no one who comes close” to Evelyn, he said back in 2019. “The most harrowing idea would be that I would spend any part of my life without her because that would be a level of loneliness and irreplaceable, irredeemable emotional desolation that I could not possibly contemplate.” The man contains multitudes, and apparently also a functional sense of humor about all of them.

Tonight: Letterman Comes Home

While Colbert is busy making confessions, there’s also a big booking to catch tonight. David Letterman — the man who held the Late Show desk for over two decades before passing it to Colbert in 2015 — returns to the show tonight, Wednesday, May 14, at 11:35 p.m. ET on CBS. The Strokes are performing.

It’s a full-circle moment in a week already stacked with them. Barack Obama appeared on Wednesday for his second Late Show visit this month alone, and CBS has confirmed the guest lineup for the final week — which includes Tom Hanks and Hamilton star Christopher Jackson — is still being rolled out ahead of the May 21 finale.

Tonight’s episode will stream on Paramount+ after it airs, and clips are expected online shortly after broadcast.

What Colbert Says He’ll Miss Most

The Strike Force Five reunion wasn’t just laughs and celebrity crushes. Colbert got genuinely reflective about what the end of the show means to him — and his answer was quieter than you might expect.

“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.”

CBS canceled the Late Show last year, citing low ratings after 11 seasons with Colbert. The network has since announced that Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen will fill the 11:35 p.m. slot after the finale. Many observers pointed to the political climate around CBS parent company Paramount Global — now under the ownership of David Ellison, a close ally of President Donald Trump — as a contributing factor, though CBS has not confirmed that framing.

Colbert himself addressed the abruptness of it all when the cancellation was announced: “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.”

The full Strike Force Five conversation is streaming on YouTube now, and it’s exactly the kind of warm, messy, honest sendoff Colbert deserves.

One week left. Letterman tonight. And somewhere out there, Michelle Williams probably has a very good story to tell about a host who was conspicuously avoiding eye contact.