It’s not every day that Jimmy Fallon asks someone from the audience to join him at his desk without warning, but that’s what happened to James Madigan, who tells LateNighter he was as shocked as he looked sitting down with Fallon and Josh Hartnett on Wednesday night’s Tonight Show.
The unusual moment came about organically after Madigan, who is making his feature film directorial debut this weekend with the Hartnett-starring action film Fight or Flight, decided to text his star backstage to let him know he was sitting in the audience.
“I didn’t want to bother [Hartnett],” Madigan said. “I didn’t even let him know I was going [ahead of time].
But when Fallon brought up several rave reviews of Hartnett’s performance, the actor called Madigan out.
“The director of the movie is here somewhere,” Hartnett said, scanning the audience for his friend. Madigan waved from his seat, but Fallon had other plans in mind.
“Come on down!,” Fallon called.
Even then, Madigan wasn’t sure what to expect from the moment—he was mainly focused on not tripping. “The steps are a little funny. They’re kind of short and staggered weird. All I was thinking was ‘I’m going to fall,’” Madigan recalls to LateNighter. “And even then, I thought I was just going to come up and shake his hand.”
Instead, Fallon ushered the un mic’d and un-made up Madigan into the main guest chair, where he fielded questions about his new film while the host held his desk microphone to his mouth so he could be heard. Watching the moment back later, Madigan realized that Fallon had told him to hold the microphone himself. “I didn’t hear that, so I’m sitting there while he’s having to reach over really awkwardly,” Madigan says.
Despite the hiccup, the moment played naturally. So much so, in fact, that he’s now having to convince his friends that it wasn’t a scripted moment. “Everyone keeps texting me like, ‘That was planned, right?’” he says. “It was a hundred percent not!”
After the interview, Madigan returned to his seat, but Fallon apparently checked in with him throughout the show. “Jimmy was so lovely,” says Madigan. “He kept coming up and being like, ‘Hey, sorry man. Didn’t mean to put you on the spot.’”
Any shock Madigan felt was understandable. Though he grew up a big fan of late-night shows like Late Night with David Letterman, the director says he never expected to find himself in front of the camera in that way. “I don’t mind doing it. I just think it’s better left to the actors because they’re famous and people might click on that,” he says. “[But] I want to make sure that I do whatever needs to be done to get the movie out there.”
“ It’s so important that people go see movies in a cinema. And they’re not going to go just because you say it’s really important that they should,” he adds. “There’s this communal experience that will die if we don’t try to figure out how to convince people to go… So if [this] will help in any way, I’ll do whatever I need to do.”
That communal experience was one he felt at The Tonight Show, too—the first late-night taping Madigan has ever attended. “There’s kind of a greatest hits reel before the warmup guy comes on, and just watching it, there’s so much creativity and so much fun that just feels really genuine,” he says. “There’s something that is so infectiously positive about Fallon that is just joyous.”
As surreal as Madigan’s Tonight Show appearance was, having his film get a proper theatrical release is even more thrilling for him. “We’re like a little independent movie, and sometimes those things don’t get the theatrical release that you really hope and dream for,” he reflects. “And we’re on thousands of screens now… like how I always really dreamed.”
Fight or Flight opens in select theaters tomorrow, May 9.
