Lisa Kudrow told then-boyfriend Conan O’Brien he was ‘no one’ when he succeeded David Letterman
nypost.comLisa Kudrow reportedly gave her ex-boyfriend, Conan O’Brien, some unconventional encouragement when he was preparing to succeed David Letterman on NBC’s “Late Night.” According to a new Vanity Fair oral history of the first year of “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” his then-girlfriend, Kudrow, 60, said, “I don’t know how much we talked about it.
I just knew, ‘You’re trying to replace David Letterman. No one replaces David Letterman. You’re no one.’ It can’t be anybody that an audience would know.”Letterman, 76, helmed the show from 1982 to 1993 (before moving from NBC to CBS to host “The Late Show With David Letterman” from 1993 to his retirement in 2015).O’Brien, 60, who led the show from Sept.
1993 to Feb. 2009, was an unknown at the time that he started, which Kudrow tried to say was a good thing. According to Vanity Fair, NBC was also considering Gary Shandling, at the time.
O’Brien confessed that there were a lot of growing pains along the way. He called his team “very naïve” and said that they “just had to go through the spanking machine” to get the spot. “I had to develop from a fetal pig to a full-size pig in front of America,” O’Brien said. “And that just had to happen.
Read more on nypost.com