For her fourth and final Late Show sit-down with Stephen Colbert, Oprah Winfrey “flipped the interview” to delve into the CBS talk show host’s current mindset about his ever-closer swan song.
In the midst of sharing an anecdote about a dream-come-true moment when “favorite Beatle” Paul McCartney held her hand, Oprah suddenly asked Colbert, “How are you feeling about the whole thing?”—meaning, of course, his cancelled talker’s May 21 series finale.
“Don’t go Oprah on me now…,” Colbert responded with a smile, before inviting Winfrey to switch seats with him and make the flipped interview official.
Settling herself behind Colbert’s Desk, Oprah effused, “This is so exciting,” and then launched into the thing she does so well.
“So I am wondering… as you stand here at the threshold of what’s about to be done… what do you feel like, in this moment, you will most want to release? [To] let go of?”
Colbert took a beat to consider the query, then asserted, “I don’t want to let anything go yet, because I have a white-knuckle grip on these people who I love, who I’ve worked with all these years.” He gestured towards house band Louis Cato and the Great Big Joy Machine, and assorted crew members, warmly acknowledging “those people right over there, the camera men, the crew. The sound, lights….
“And the audience, obviously,” he added—teeing up a back-and-forth with the former daytime talk queen about the vital role those listening to an interview play in that process.
“When you and I are talking to each other, there’s a third person in the conversation, and it’s the audience— and they are doing their job better than you and I can,” Colbert posited. “If I’m asking questions, I want to make sure I’m hitting all the questions. And you might be saying, ‘I want to hit all the things I want to answer.’ But there is something else going on besides what we are doing. The audience is very pure in their engagement in our conversation.”
Colbert most interestingly illustrated his need for an audience thusly: “If there’s somebody I need to talk to on a corporate level [and] the conversation is not going to go that well, I will ask my assistant and someone else to sit at the desk across from me so I have an ‘audience’ to hear me have the phone call, so that I will say what I actually feel,” he shared. “Because the audience makes me do it more than I will make me do it.”
Oprah seconded Colbert’s sentiment, and then launched into her goodbye message for the Late Show host.
” I just want to say to you, thank you so much,” she started. “Thank you so much for holding the space for laughter.”
To the studio audience, she turned and asked, “Has he not held the space for laughter for us in our lives…?” The Ed Sullivan Theater filled with cheers and applause, as The Late Show with Stephen Colbert marked off one more day done, another day closer to May 21.
Watch Oprah and Colbert’s “flipped interview” above.
