Typically, when a famous comedian ventures into writing, it’s in service of a book of humorous essays or a screenplay for a starring vehicle. Stephen Colbert, the comic actor turned beloved talkshow host, is preparing a more unusual pivot: he’ll be working on the screenplay for a new Lord of the Rings movie, to be produced by franchise impresario Peter Jackson, who directed the original trilogy of films based on the JRR Tolkien fantasy novels, as well as a trilogy based on Tolkien’s book The Hobbit. To casual viewers of his about-to-end Late Show on CBS, or those who remember his years as a contributor to Comedy Central’s irreverent The Daily Show, this might seem like an odd fit; Tolkien isn’t known for his satirical edge. Colbert, however, is known for his love of Tolkien – among other things.
Befitting his eventual gig as a political satirist, Colbert was born in Washington DC, the youngest of 11 children in a Catholic family that subsequently lived in Maryland and South Carolina. The family suffered a major loss in 1974 when two of Colbert’s brothers and their father were killed in a plane crash. Colbert was only 10 and became withdrawn after the tragedy, retreating into books – especially fantasy books like the works of Tolkien – and games like Dungeons & Dragons, which he played heavily for four years. This provided some early training in acting and improvisation without him entirely realizing it. “For somebody who eventually became an actor, it was interesting to have done that for so many years, because acting is role-playing,” he told the AV Club in 2006. “You assume a character, and you have to stay in them over years, and you create histories, and you apply your powers. It’s good improvisation with agreed rules before you go in.”
After studying dramatic acting at Northwestern University, he parlayed an interest in improvisational performance to doing comedy at Chicago’s fabled Second City, where he met future collaborators Steve Carell, Amy Sedaris, and Paul Dinello. They would all figure into his subsequent move to television: with Dinello and Sedaris, he co-created the short-lived sketch series Exit 57 and the cult sitcom Strangers with Candy, both of which aired on Comedy Central. Colbert also worked with Carell on The Dana Carvey Show, another short-lived sketch comedy project, this one airing on network TV and starring the former Saturday Night Live player, with writers including SNL alumnus Robert Smigel and future Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman.
Shortly after that show’s cancellation, Colbert got a correspondent position on another Comedy Central program: The Daily Show, during the show’s second season in 1997 (Colbert was there before Carell and even signature host Jon Stewart; both joined in 1999). Over his eight years on the program, Colbert developed a character parodying gasbag pundits like Bill O’Reilly – using his own name, but applied to a self-confident, bloviating persona without any background knowledge on the many subjects he opines on. He developed the character further when he left in 2005 for a companion series, The Colbert Report. The show made its mark from its very first episode, where Colbert, in-character as a conservative pundit, coined the term “truthiness” – referring to believing that a statement or idea is true regardless of outside facts or evidence, based entirely on whether it “feels” true.
Truthiness might have been applied to the version of Colbert on his self-titled show, which was both further and closer to his real self. In the broad outlines, this fake rightwinger was worlds apart from the comedian’s true personality: self-important, dim-witted, belligerent (or, in the words of Colbert himself, “a well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot”) and modelled after cable-news staples like O’Reilly and Glenn Beck. But playing a phony Colbert on TV also involved bringing in elements of the real Colbert’s backstory, like his Catholic upbringing and his love of Tolkien and Lord of the Rings. Viggo Mortensen, who played Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings films, even made a cameo in-character on The Colbert Report in 2007. In a 2008 interview, Colbert admitted that his on-air character could sometimes slip his own thoughts or beliefs into broadcasts or public appearances: “The weird thing about my character … is sometimes I say what I mean. It doesn’t matter to me that the audience doesn’t know when that is.” (Though years later, he would say that Catholicism and Lord of the Rings were basically his only common ground with that character – while also allowing that his own political beliefs were probably less leftwing than some might assume.)
Colbert had the opportunity to retire that hall-of-mirrors trickiness in 2015, when he ended The Colbert Report to take over The Late Show on CBS. The late-night talkshow was originally created for David Letterman to compete with The Tonight Show back in 1993. After Letterman’s retirement, Colbert took to the host job with enthusiasm – and as himself, not the pundit version, which disappointed some fans of his performance art as he settled in for a more mainstream, crowd-pleasing gig. Still, owing to his Daily Show roots as well as the timing of his Late Show debut – just before the 2016 US presidential election – Colbert’s version of The Late Show was more oriented toward political commentary than Letterman’s, especially as Colbert found his footing. New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik observed a change early in Trump’s first term: “Mr. Colbert’s comedy hasn’t become radically different, but it has been more frank and caustic. The network-TV [Colbert] is more cheery than his cable character. But it’s as if the Trump administration had solved the problem of reconciling his new comedy with his old by making truthiness America’s official language.”
Though the satire was, as Poniewozik noted, less biting than The Colbert Report, and buttressed by plenty of the usual celebrity chit-chat, Colbert nonetheless seemed more civically engaged, sometimes downright earnest, than his competition. Audiences seemed to enjoy it, too. Bucking the conventional wisdom that viewers don’t want to think too much about current events during their late-night comfort food, Colbert’s Late Show grew its audience as it became more politically focused. Eventually, it was the most-watched late-night network talkshow in the US, routinely seen by more viewers than either Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show on NBC or Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC. So it came as a surprise to some when CBS made the decision to end the show with Colbert’s contract expiring in May 2026.
Their wholesale cancellation of The Late Show, not just Colbert’s hosting of it, was intended to signal that the network is just plain exiting the expensive late-night business, rather than (as some suspected) enacting a punishment of the highly Trump-critical Colbert to curry favor with the second Trump administration (which was, at the time of the cancellation, in the position to block a merger between CBS parent company Paramount and Skydance Media). Still, despite declining late-night ratings and fortunes, the axing of such a high-profile figure in the field does feel punitive.
Maybe that’s just “truthiness” rearing its ugly head again. Regardless, Colbert made a lovely case for the institution of late-night programming in an interview after the cancellation announcement: “All those things that might’ve made you confused, angry, or anxious, or happy, or surprised or something like that, I share those feelings with the audience and they laugh or they don’t laugh. And there’s a sense of community there. And there are fewer and fewer of what you would call third spaces in our life. Not your home, not your work, but some other place we get together. And these late-night shows are for millions of Americans a third space to come together and think about the day.”
That thoughtfulness often emerged in his less comedic segments, as with a 2021 interview with Andrew Garfield touching upon his grief over the recent loss of his mother. Garfield later reflected on how Colbert created that space for him: “The openness and ownership that he has with seemingly culturally taboo subjects, such as grief, allows his guests permission to be in contact and reveal those aspects of their own selves and experiences. In turn, the audience gets to have a genuine, deep, and connected experience. So, the show feels like an act of service to people.” (“I think Stephen would have made a great priest,” he added.)
That sense of the talkshow as a public space does seem to be vanishing; even as dedicated a figure as Conan O’Brien has stepped away in recent years. Colbert seems unlikely to retire from showbiz. (Asked if he would walk away after the Late Show’s end, he offered a definitive “no”, adding: “Because I love creating things and I still want to work with the people I work with.”) In some ways, writing a Lord of the Rings movie seems like a full-circle moment, bringing him back to the literature and role-playing that consoled him in his youth – and might be healthier than the talkshow host’s compulsion to keep hosting talkshows. Colbert also seems to reveal aspects of himself in stages: first he was a comic actor playing clearly made-up roles; then he was a fake pundit sharing his own name; then a talkshow host with a performer’s persona but one closer to himself. If he finds a way to return to writing and/or performing while revealing yet a little more of himself, Colbert could be headed for a fascinating third or fourth act.