Stephen Colbert closed out Los Angeles’ annual PaleyFest TV festival on Sunday afternoon, as he sat down for a conversation with comedian Ben Schwartz about his career and time at The Late Show desk.
During the wide-ranging chat inside the Dolby Theatre — which spanned from Colbert’s start in Chicago’s improv scene to his stint as a Sunday school teacher and his love of fantasy films — Schwartz asked the host if he would ever want to return to acting, which he went to school for.
“I was purely acting up until I had The Late Show ,” Colbert recalled, as he had been in character on The Colbert Report and The Daily Show . “One of the weirdest things about taking the job is my manager, James “Babydoll” Dixon, when he said, ‘Hey, it’s you.’ And I went, ‘Me?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, do you want to do it?’ And I’m like, ‘James, I’m an actor.’ Like, if I do the show, it’s the first time in my life I wasn’t inhabiting a character all the time. And, he goes, ‘Yeah, you can be an actor any time, no one’s ever going to offer you this job again.’ And I went, ‘Oh that’s kind of true,’ then it seemed like an adventure to me.”