In December 2013, after auditioning for Saturday Night Live and making it to the final round at 30 Rock, Amber Ruffin flew back home to Los Angeles feeling confident. She’d been invited to stay and watch the Fallon/Timberlake Christmas episode—a promising sign. When the call came that she didn’t get the job, she was heartbroken.
“I thought I was gonna die,” she tells Mark Malkoff in this week’s season premiere of LateNighter’s Inside Late Night podcast.
Three days later, her phone rang again.
It was Seth Meyers, with whom she’d worked a decade earlier at Amsterdam’s Boom Chicago improv theater. Ruffin assumed he was calling to console her. Instead, he offered her a job.
Meyers was preparing to take over NBC’s 12:35 a.m. timeslot and launch Late Night with Seth Meyers. He needed writers who could also perform. Would she move to New York—in less than a week?
Twelve years later, Amber Ruffin is still working with Meyers at Late Night (“There is no reason why you would ever quit this job,” she explains)—but that’s just one punch on her ever-evolving dance card. While still at the show, she hosted her own Emmy-nominated late-night series for Peacock, The Amber Ruffin Show. She also co-wrote a book with her sister Lacey Lamar and earned a Tony nomination for co-writing the book of Broadway’s Some Like It Hot.
These days, she appears weekly as a team captain on CNN’s Have I Got News For You and is currently in previews with her new Off-Broadway musical Bigfoot! at New York City Center ahead of its March 1 opening.
If that sounds like a lot, Ruffin isn’t complaining. “If it’s not fun, I’m not doing it,” she says—a guiding principle that helps explain how she juggles it all without losing her sense of play.
Click the embed above to listen to Amber Ruffin’s full conversation with Mark Malkoff now, or find Inside Late Night on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
