With less than a month between now and the May 21 finale date for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, its titular host has begun one last race over the media hurdles. That includes (per a new interview with THR) a whole lot of very careful talk about the politics of his ouster at CBS—noting that he had “a very cuttable throat” if the network was looking for sacrifices to the current White House and/or corporate regimes—but also some more detailed conversations about his next gig, writing a film set in the universe of his beloved Lord Of The Rings.
Specifically, Colbert was asked the fairly loaded question of why fans of the franchise should trust a guy whose last non-talk-show-scripting work was the Strangers With Candy movie in 2005 with their beloved Middle-earth? To which Colbert was that particular calm kind of cagey he tends to get in interviews where the answers might actually matter, noting, “I mean, there’s no reason to.” He went on to acknowledge “There’s no value in me addressing that because all you can do as—I’ll use a loaded term here—an artist is follow your heart and the craft that you have learned to try to turn this into something that is not fandom but drama.” Colbert also acknowledged that “luckily, I don’t have to do this alone,” pointing out that he’s working with longtime Lord Of The Rings writer Philippa Boyens, who co-wrote all of Peter Jackson’s films in the franchise. Colbert: “I will just say that every moment has been a joy so far.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Colbert lightly touched on CBS’s claims that he was losing them massive amounts of money by making his show—”Um, it came as a surprise”—discussed Byron Allen taking over his old timeslot, and reminded viewers that he’s actually fairly conservative, it’s just reality that’s gotten radically right-wing: “I’m a moderate, suburban Catholic, but people perceive me as this liberal thing when in fact what presents itself as modern conservatism [today] is actually radical behavior. I believe that what purports to be the present conservative movement is actually engaged in constant heresy against reality. Just wish-casting a world to exist that doesn’t, which is very destructive. That’s like alcoholism. That’s reaching for a drug that’s really a poison all the time in order to give you the worldview that you hope.”