Timothy Olyphant returned to Late Night with Seth Meyers Tuesday night for his 11th appearance, less than four months after his last visit. But this time, he brought reinforcements.
The Justified and Deadwood star has made something of a specialty of hijacking late-night interviews. On Tuesday, Olyphant enlisted his Stick co-star Owen Wilson to help with the job.
One of Olyphant’s recurring Late Night bits involves writing his own introduction, filling it with outrageous compliments about himself and embarrassing declarations of affection from Meyers, who is left to read the lines cold.
So when Wilson appeared onstage before Olyphant’s entrance, it was ostensibly to assure Meyers that his friend would be on his best behavior.
“Tonight, nothing gimmicky,” Wilson promised. “It’s going to live and die on the interview tonight.”
Moments later, Meyers found himself reading lines describing Olyphant as “the guy whose photo I bring to the barber and say ‘That, make me look like that,'” and “the guy my kids all call dad.”
Wilson, meanwhile, never quite left the stage. Eventually, Meyers invited him to join them, and the two actors spent much of the rest of the interview ganging up on their host.
By the time the first commercial break arrived, Meyers had managed to ask just one question.
“I feel like you guys don’t have the same sense of, like, the passage of time as I do,” he told them.
For Olyphant, it was business as usual.
The actor has become one of late night’s most reliably entertaining guests, because he treats the interview itself as a performance.
He’s a gifted improviser, always looking for an opportunity to build on a joke, pursue a tangent, or throw his host off balance.
And Meyers, whose own background is in improv, is an ideal scene partner.
The host has made no secret of how much he enjoys Olyphant’s visits. In 2020, Meyers joked on social media that he loved all his guests equally, but Olyphant made a strong case for being his favorite every time.
During a visit last year, he told Olyphant, “I’m not gonna lie, this is my favorite when you’re here.”
But Meyers wasn’t the first late-night host to discover Olyphant’s particular talents.
That distinction belongs to Conan O’Brien, another host with deep roots in improvisational comedy, who developed a similarly playful rapport with the actor.
In 2016, Olyphant and fellow guest Jerrod Carmichael refused to play along when O’Brien attempted to introduce musical guest Sturgill Simpson, whose performance had actually been taped earlier in the day. The resulting outtakes offered a hilarious glimpse behind the late-night curtain.
Two years later, Olyphant informed O’Brien he’d been cut from Avengers: Infinity War, then improvised an increasingly absurd origin story for his fictional character, Captain Japan.
There’s a long tradition of special relationships between late-night hosts and their favorite guests, from Johnny Carson and Charles Grodin to David Letterman and Steve Martin, and O’Brien and Norm Macdonald.
What Olyphant shares with those great guests is an understanding that a talk-show appearance isn’t merely an opportunity to promote a movie or TV series. It’s another chance to entertain.
In a piece last year about Paul Rudd—another of late night’s all-time great guests—LateNighter’s Bill Carter recalled something Jimmy Kimmel once told Howard Stern: Being a great talk-show guest is a lot like being a great dinner guest.
Olyphant is the dinner guest who shows up with his own introduction, spends the evening making fun of the host, and somehow keeps getting invited back.
