Seth Meyers was quick to tout a wonderfully obscure Late Night accomplishment during this week’s new edition of Corrections.
But as delightful as it was to hear LateNighter name-checked from the desk—a person’s own name is the sweetest sound to hear, and all that—we must note that his proffered piece of trivia calls for a correction of its own.
“Made a little late-night history tonight on our show…,” Meyers declared to kick off the latest episode of the NBC talker’s Emmy-nominated web series.
“[Thursday’s] first guest: Idris Elba. Second guest: Marisa Abela,” he recapped. “First time in late-night history that the entirety of the first guest’s last name has been contained in the second guest’s last name…
“Not that LateNighter will give a f*cking sh*t,” he quipped.
Oh, but we do! We always do.
Within minutes of Corrections Episode 161 hitting YouTube, LateNighter’s Slack pinged with the observation that the Elba-Abela feat was not a first for late-night TV, or even Late Night for that matter.
With many of Steve Allen and Jack Paar’s Tonight Show guest lineups lost to time, a thorough review of all late-night shows, to find the true first instance of this, is impossible. But even Late Night with Seth Meyers had claimed the convoluted distinction before.
Excluding instances in which two related guests appear together (such as Kurt and Wyatt Russell, or Jake and Alice Paul Tapper), Meyers booked a guest whose surname was contained in the following guest’s surname as recently as last summer.
The date: July 28, 2025.
The guests: Sandra Oh and Erin Doherty. (“Doherty” contains “oh,” and perhaps even more impressive to us nerds, with the letters in the same order.)
In Meyers’ defense, Idris Elba and Marisa Abela’s full names do bear a much more striking resemblance.
Also, Elba nearly took part in such an achievement once before. In August 2017, he was followed on Late Night by Alexis Bledel, whose last name is just one letter shy of a full “Elba.”
While Thursday’s episode of Late Night may not have delivered a (highly!) specific milestone, Wednesday’s episode did. Both of Meyers’ guests, Jodie Foster and Simu Liu, collected their final “late-night Infinity Stones” with their visits, as LateNighter reported.
Update: One eagle-eyed jackal, Youtuber @oliviaeason1030, has surfaced other examples: Nathan Lane and Genevieve Angelson in 2016, Saoirse Ronan and Rachel Brosnahan in 2017, and Issa Rae and Nikki Glaser in 2022.
