As his Emmy-winning comedic travel series “Conan O’Brien Must Go” returns for a second season, O’Brien admits it’s a bit of an unusual time to be thinking about exploring the world as an American. “It’s long been a passion of mine to travel the world, and now that America’s loved more than ever, I’m very looking forward to being an ambassador,” he jokes. “If nothing else, they can take out their aggression and rage at me.”
“Conan O’Brien Must Go” Season 2, which features visits to Spain, New Zealand and Austria, returns May 8 on Max — and has already been renewed for Season 3. “Although that was before the tariffs,” O’Brien says, “so I’m a little worried about that. It may cost us $700 million to go to China, and shoot for eight seconds.”
The Variety Awards Circuit Podcast recently spoke with O’Brien in front of a live audience at the American Cinematheque’s nonfiction film festival “This Is Not a Fiction.” At the event, O’Brien talked about the show, as well as his takeaway from hosting the Oscars (and his decision to do it again next year), his dramatic turn in the film “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” and why he’s having the best time of his career now. Listen below!
O’Brien may indeed be the cultural ambassador the world needs right now. “That’s a terrible thing to say!” he quips. But actually, bridging the gap and providing universal laughs has been a natural for the former talk show host, and that includes on his podcasts as well as “Conan O’Brien Must Go.”
“My humor is very self effacing, and I’m comfortable when people are laughing at me and when they’re in the position of power,” he says. “And so now, more than ever, that feels like a good tone to be spreading around the world. That there are some of us who have some humility and are ashamed of ourselves… my favorite thing is to not get a reaction from people who are from another land and horrified.”
Of course, in doing “Conan O’Brien Must Go,” he has come up with a format that might be described as the opposite of your typical travel show. “Travel is such a popular genre, and I always thought I wanted to do a travel show where you know less about the country afterwards than you did going in,” he says. “I also have a lot of envy, because I watched the other travel shows where they’re just tasting delicious food and going, ‘this is incredible!’ Then cut back to a five-star hotel. We’re running around, and people are putting a Don Quixote mustache and beard on me with bad glue.”
The show follows O’Brien as he surprises fans who contact him with travel suggestions. “I’m very blessed that I have fans that are good natured and funny, and they invariably are willing to give things a go, and they have a good heart,” he says. “That just seems to be what translates.”
And also this season, he’s joined by celebrities including Javier Bardem in Spain and Taiki Waititi in New Zealand. But even a lot of his interactions with the stars are improvised.
“It’s very much, very much guerilla filmmaking, very much grab and go,” O’Brien says. “And the best things are always accidents, and you always hope for those little things that happened that you didn’t think would happen. Javier was so willing to do all of these things!”
O’Brien was in the middle of shooting Season 2 when he got the call to host the Oscars, and he managed to balance both. But it was still a scramble, which is why he was excited to sign on for a second year — and have more time to really plan things out.
“I thought it might be fun to do it again when we know what it is,” he says. “The first time you do it, so much of it is just discovery. And then they asked us right away, would we we come back? I said, Yeah, I’d like to do that again now that we even know a little more, and maybe we could have a little more time. I had a really good time. It’s a nice sports car to drive, that Oscars.
“I think the thing that helped me is that I really do love movies. I grew up watching some of my heroes, Johnny Carson, Bob Hope, Billy Crystal hosting the Oscars. So it’s cool to be part of that little chain. And so I think we worked really hard and we had good material. But I also think it helps when I had real joy and enthusiasm about doing it and and for the art form of cinema, and as I do for television.”
Next up, O’Brien will be seen in the A24 film “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You,” from filmmaker Mary Bronstein. The movie stars Rose Byrne as a mother struggling to cope with her child’s illness; in his dramatic debut, O’Brien plays her hostile therapist.
Recalls O’Brien: “I got a call, maybe a year and a half ago, from Adam Sandler. And he just said, ‘Hey, buddy, A24 wants to know if they can talk to you about doing a movie. And I said, ‘A24, yeah, I guess so.’ And he went, ‘you fucking bet, yes!’” I read the script, and I thought it was terrific, and unlike anything I’ve read before… I spent a while trying to talk them out of casting me because I said, ‘you’ve got Rose Byrne, I’m not an actor. I’m not that’s not something I aspire to.’ And Mary Bronstein was like, ‘no, you’re the right person for this.’ And so she worked with me. I did work really hard, and I think it came out pretty well. This movie is not about me. Rose Byrne, I believe, gives a performance that will make people’s eyeballs fall out in a good way. It’s already been a hit at film festivals, so I’m glad that I didn’t get in the way of this film’s success.”
Between that, O’Brien’s growing podcast empire and “Conan O’Brien Must Go” (which won the Emmy for outstanding writing for a nonfiction program in 2024), the star is on quite a roll.
“I’ve been blessed with this incredibly great career, but I believe that I’m more creatively engaged now at 61 than I’ve been at any other point in my life,” he says. “And I don’t know how that happened. These opportunities are coming my way, and I take them very seriously,. I work hard on them, but I’m having so much fun and feeling like I’m getting to try a lot of different kinds of things. As much as I loved doing that old late night format, I’ve been very glad that when you leave it, all these other things have popped up.”
Variety’s “Awards Circuit” podcast, hosted by Clayton Davis, Jazz Tangcay, Emily Longeretta, Jenelle Riley and Michael Schneider, who also produces, is your one-stop source for lively conversations about the best in film and television. Each episode, “Awards Circuit” features interviews with top film and TV talent and creatives, discussions and debates about awards races and industry headlines, and much more. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or anywhere you download podcasts.
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