Stephen Colbert has interviewed a lot of people over his years at The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and now The Late Show.
He’s spoken with Jon Stewart, John Oliver, the late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, and many people not named John. None of those interviews, though, were anything like the interview he had with actor Jeff Goldblum on Thursday night’s episode of The Late Show .
The Jurassic Park star had stopped by the late night talk show to promote his new film The Mountain, in which he plays the man who invented the transorbital lobotomy, which is the horrifying process of piercing a patient’s brain with an ice pick. “Gruesome,” Goldblum said. But the film only got a passing mention amid the many, many topics that Goldblum covered during his time at the show. As the actor bounced from subject to subject, Colbert struggled to keep up as Goldblum veering from wound care to prison poker to fishing, displaying an impressive collection of throat lozenges on the host’s desk before playing a movie trivia game.
“I just want to know,” Colbert deadpanned, four-and-a-half minutes into Goldblum’s stream of conscious roll, “Have we recorded any of this so far?” Even that barely slows Goldblum’s roll and Colbert has no choice but to just let him go.
“I live more in 10 minutes than most people do in an entire lifetime,” Goldblum jokes at one point during his impressively scattershot approach to an interview. Finally, Goldblum and Colbert recited the classic Alfred Noyes poem “The Highwayman” from memory an impressive, if oddly-timed academic feat that seems to both wow the audience and confuse them. An act that perfectly sums up the entire interview.
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