Conan O’Brien revealed to Eric Idle on a current episode of the “Conan O’Brien Wants a Buddy” podcast (by way of Leisure Weekly) that Robin Williams chilly known as him after NBC fired him as host of “The Tonight Present.” O’Brien took over the late night time present from Jay Leno in 2009, however he was infamously fired after seven months. The community determined to dump O’Brien and convey again Leno.
“I used to be fortunate sufficient to have some nice interactions with Robin Williams earlier than he handed,” O’Brien mentioned. “One of the vital memorable examples to me is once I went by my entire ‘Tonight Present’ debacle. Lastly, the present is finished, and I don’t know if I’ve a profession anymore. What am I gonna do subsequent? I’m mendacity on the ground in the lounge of my home, and my telephone rings, and I decide it up, and it’s Robin Williams.”
“I don’t even know the way he received my telephone quantity,” O’Brien continued. “[Williams asked,] ‘How are you holding up, chief?’ And he mentioned, you realize, ‘You’re gonna be fantastic, you’re gonna be nice.’”
Williams then instructed O’Brien to go all the way down to the native bike store in Santa Monica as a result of Williams had arrange a motorbike for O’Brien to hire for the day. Each gents had been avid bikers on the time.
“And I mentioned, ‘What?’” O’Brien remembered. “And he mentioned, ‘No, no, no, simply head on down there. Experience round, you’ll really feel higher.’ And I went down and it was a Colnago, which is a really good bike. And he mentioned, ‘I instructed him to color it in all these loopy Irish colours.’ I get down there and it’s the ugliest — I imply, it was simply greens and shamrocks and all the things. And he was like, ‘You’re going to love that bike, chief. Don’t fear about it.’”
It seems clearing his head and biking round Santa Monica is simply what O’Brien wanted within the second. He added, “I thanked [Robin] many, many occasions. I simply couldn’t imagine that he was interested by me.”
Idle was one in every of Williams’ shut pals and instructed O’Brien that such a sort gesture was “typical” of Williams, who died in August 2014. “He would put a number of effort into making you are feeling higher,” Idle added. “That’s fantastically typical Robin. That generosity and kindness mixed with the wit of the person will not be a standard mixture.”
It was Williams who taught Idle to be beneficiant to followers, the Monty Python comic admitted. “I’d simply inform them to fuck off and they’d snigger and go away, you realize?” Idle defined of his fan interactions. “And that turned a factor. Then I watched Robin and his empathy, remembering that that is any person’s second of their life and it’s a giant second of their life as a result of they’ve waited, they love you, they need this second. So if you’re shit or dismissive, it’s a nasty reminiscence.”
Take heed to the complete “Conan O’Brien Wants a Buddy” podcast episode with Idle right here.
