Where Everybody Knows Your Name with Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson (sometimes) - Jimmy Kimmel
Episode Date: October 22, 2025Just days before his late night show was suspended by ABC, Jimmy Kimmel sat down with Ted Danson to record this episode. They spoke about Jimmy’s daily routine, the time he hosted a dinner party for... Woody Harrelson and Owen Wilson, going from radio to hosting Jimmy Kimmel Live, how faith compels him to speak his mind, the indispensable role of family in his life, and more. Like watching your podcasts? Visit http://youtube.com/teamcoco to see full episodes. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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I don't think of it as courage.
I think of it as just obvious.
I think of it as having really no choice,
but to talk about these things.
Welcome back to where everybody knows your name.
If you've been paying any attention to the news this month,
you probably have an opinion about today's guest,
Jimmy Kimmel, and his recent suspension.
We recorded this episode six days before he was taken off the air for courageously speaking his mind.
Personally, I'm grateful he's back on TV where he belongs.
Whether you think he's a hero like I do or disagree with him, what's indisputable is that Jimmy is a Hall of Fame broadcast talent.
Since 2003, he's been the host of Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC, making him the longest-serving current, late-neutral.
night host on television. An incredible streak, and one we shouldn't take for granted if we've learned
anything from these events. Just a lovely, generous gentleman, and I'm thrilled I took the time
to come straight from his show to record ours. Jimmy Kimmel, every.
Are you a cook? Oh yeah, I cook, yeah, yeah. Italian. Oh, that's one of the things. Grill,
I grill, I grill, I barbecue, I cook Italian. I am most things. I like you. I like.
Are you the cook or Molly?
I am the cook in the house.
Yeah, I make breakfast.
It's like, I'm like a short order cook every morning.
I make waffles.
I make pancakes.
I make eggs.
Everybody wants something different every day.
And so I'm in there making it.
I make the dog eggs every morning.
And, yeah, I make all the meals.
I do breakfast.
I do dogs.
Well, Mary would say correctly that she chips in on all of these.
But I love making breakfast.
I love bringing coffee to Mary in the morning.
morning. I love feeding the dog and I'm great at lunches. I'm great at opening up the refrigerator
and finding something and making something good. That's what I like to do also. I'm not a dinner
guy. Not a dinner guy. I'm not a cook. I love the challenge. I love like an 1130. Boy, I'm hungry
type of situation. But that's you, wait, 1130. At night, you know, it's like my wife will get hungry.
Maybe we've been out and it's been too long since we ate. She's like, I'm hungry. And I'll like,
let me figure something out, I go in the cabinets, and I'll usually put together some kind of,
I always have like a chicken broth in the refrigerator, and from there I can always put some
kind of pasta together. I'll add a little tomatoes, some garlic, some little tiny didilini pasta.
Maybe I'll go out in the garden and get some kale or something and put it in there.
Maybe I'll mix a little bit of, I'll mix an egg in with some polenta or some aline,
and drizzle it into the soup and make kind of an Italian egg drop soup.
I get, yeah, I get very serious.
I don't kid around.
Wow.
Did you see you, did you notice that when you said at 11.30, I went, you mean lunch?
Because 1130, I've been asleep for at least two and a half hours.
Yeah.
Your life is so different.
I don't stay up that late typically, but on the weekends, like if we go out or something like
that, yeah, we're usually up until midnight.
But you just came from work.
I did. I just came from work, just did the show. Sean Penn was on the show. Oh, wow.
This kid, Owen Cooper was on the show. And I was thinking about you. And I'm going to tell you why I was thinking about you.
Because this kid, Owen Cooper, and by now we'll know, he seems likely to win the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in a limited series for adolescents on Netflix.
And the kid who has the youngest person ever to win the Emmy. Do you know who that is?
no you worked with her in a TV movie called Something for Amelia or something about Amelia yes wow
now she won the Emmy for that when she was 14 years old and so I was just looking through the
research and looking at it and I saw you and I noted that I looked up the plot of this TV
movie something about Amelia yeah I played the incestuous father you play the incestuous father
and I started thinking about this.
I'm like, oh, yeah, Cheers is already on the air.
It's a big hit.
You're Sam Malone, everybody's favorite guy,
and somebody comes to you and says,
we like you to play a man who rapes his daughter.
And you're like, oh, that would be great.
Let me correct you.
He was very loving.
Sorry, didn't, yes, no, it was horrible.
Yeah, no, it was so well done.
Glenn Close was in it.
Yeah.
Is that what sold you, or did you?
You sell her.
Randa Haynes was the director, an amazing director, Glenn Close, a really thoughtful script
so that it wasn't, it wasn't exploitive in any way.
Did you feel like it was a risk like that maybe I shouldn't do this?
No, I mean, because I was more actor at that point than TV Star, kind of thing.
I was still going to be with Glenn Close and a really good script.
he was a playwright the guy wrote it in new york so everything about it was perfect it was so well done
i will suit their horn that laws were changed around the world as a result of that show yeah wow
yeah i mean literally one scandinavian country reconvened parliament the next day no more fucking
your kids no oh see you just you just hung my face on that phrase
Roxanne is all yes that's right okay youngest demiwinner right so so as I was preparing for this
you know as the actor you know what if what if what if and you could and I spoke to people who had
not committed incest but people had worked with those people or tried to talk with them and everybody
told me that it was such a taboo that you could understand people's motivation right up until the
line that they crossed and then then
They're goneers. You can't get anything real from them. But Ted, the actor, was going,
you know, trying to get there. And most I could come up with is just tell the truth,
don't be bad acting so that people can discount the story and say, well, that's not me. That's not,
you know. So then, flash forward to, we were out in Malibu, and we had a house that was
next to Steve McQueen's son. And Steve McQueen's son,
And I'm blanking, I'm sorry on his name, would have young beautiful people all over on the weekends, his part of the beach.
And I was on a balcony looking down, and I was, this was before I met Mary, this was, you know, whatever, 40 years ago.
And I looked down, I went, wow, oh my God, look at that girl.
Oh, my God, she's gorgeous.
Cut to later walking down on the beach
And that gorgeous girl came running up to me and said
Hi, Ted, it's Roxanna Zol
And I flushed with so much shame
I went, I now understand what I was trying to act
This was many years later
40 years later
Oh, I got it, shame
Wow, that's what I think they call that full circle
Yeah
Wow. Yeah. Well, I was impressed. I was impressed because that seemed ballsy to me. But now that I hear your story, it seems more actory than anything. Yeah, it was. So I just can't fathom your day. What time do you go to work?
I go, I don't go. My day is regimented. And every, like, 15-minute period is accounted for. So I wake up. I will make the family breakfast.
I then exercise a couple of times a week.
I then will go through the written material that's email to me.
What time is it, please?
By the clock now?
I get up at 6.45.
We get the kids off to school.
I go to the gym.
I then go to my email.
I look at about 30 pages of jokes and material scripts.
That has been written by Molly and Company.
Our writers, yeah, yeah.
I whittle it down to about five.
pages, I rewrite stuff, I send it to them. We then have a segment producer's meeting over
Zoom. We talk about the guests that night. I drive into work. What time? At 1115. I go to rehearsal
1130. We have rehearsal. We go up to my office. Rehearsal means going through whatever skits or bits
or the monologue and the model. And looking at about 30 clips from the news and deciding which
ones we're going to use. We figure out what order we're going to put them in for the monologue.
and then I work with two other writers
and we write the monologue for the night.
I put makeup on.
I go downstairs.
Somebody makes a mistake of turning on CNN
and going, oh, shit.
And then if something happens,
we start over again.
And the truth is, it's a huge pain in the ass,
but it's fun.
It's fun because you're suddenly in a race against time
to get these jokes on the air.
And if it's a big, you know, Trump does crazy stuff.
and you're like, well, we can't not have this in the show.
And also the East Coast shows will not get that stuff a lot of times because they've taped earlier than we have.
So it gives us a little advantage.
So we really want to make the most of it.
And we try to.
And then we put the show on.
We tape it.
And I go home.
Now, your wife, Molly, she does work there, right?
She works.
She works in.
Executive producer and writer?
Yeah, head writer, executive producer.
Does that mean she has to go in earlier than you?
No.
She goes in.
In fact, I'm there.
more than she is yeah yeah she goes home a little early on me she watches the monologue and goes
home okay i have to just stop and say in our household molly and you i'll get to you in a second
but molly is like uh heroic and uh i i think she did a i don't know that this is true
but at the oscars when you all had the um previous oscar winners
present or not present, but just...
Right, when she was executive producing the Oscars.
Every nominee would be talked about
by a previous Oscar winner in that category.
So I do believe, and Mary does,
that Molly said, oh, let's get Mary to introduce Emily
because they're great friends.
That is absolutely true, Emily Park.
Well, it meant so much to Mary.
Oh, how nice.
Hugely.
And I don't know if Mary said,
opportunity to thank Molly directly, but this is us thanking Molly.
I will, yeah, I'll pass that along.
Please.
Yeah, well, I think Molly talked to Emily and said, who, you know, who do you really
have a relationship with?
And she said, oh, great, Mary, perfect.
All right.
Let's do it.
She's still heroic.
And what I loved about that, Ask, that was the first time that happened.
I do believe.
I don't know.
I think it is.
But what it made us all in the.
audience feel was a sense of community. It wasn't just, though, someone, you're going to have a
winner and you're going to have a bunch of losers in the next few minutes. No, you're going to
understand that all of these amazing actors are, you know, celebrated by all of us in the room,
as opposed to holding your breath to see who wins. It's interesting that you say that because
I have like similar, but maybe the converse of that in some ways, the roasts. Like, you know,
the roast used to be so much fun and you'd see these, you know, these Don Rickles and Bob Newhart
and these people who were friends, Martin, Milton Burl roasting each other. And then it was like that,
I think, when the roasts revived at the end of the 90s and like, you know, early 2000s. But then
they became such a, it became like a business thing. And you'd have these roasts with these
subjects of the roast being roasted by people they never even met because they were just
book in the show. And it just, that's when I,
I was like, you know what? I don't want to do these anymore. And I think maybe they've come back
around to only using people who know each other. But it's weird when like they just go out
and get, you know, somebody, some comedian or some actor who's famous and they know it's a good
name to have on the bill to roast somebody that they've never met before. They don't have
license to do that, really. Yeah. There's no chemistry, there's no relationship there. Yeah. Like
there was. I love our community and I love that you were part of that bringing that back. That was
pretty cool. Well, thank you. And I, I just have to say, because I was driving over here and I was
thinking about this and, you know, I try to like remember the opportunity to sit here and talk to you
for an hour is very exciting to me. And if you told me this when I was like 17 years old,
I don't even know, I don't think I would be able to complete my life. Like I'd be, first of all,
I'd be telling everybody, you know, about 40 years, I'm going to be sitting with Ted
dancing in the room and just chatting about stuff.
And it is exciting to me because you really are one of my favorites.
And I will also say that we have recently started binge watching The Good Place with our kids.
Yeah.
And we love it.
And it's so, so good.
And you're so great.
And Mike, sure.
It's so good.
Amazing writer.
Yeah.
Okay.
This is embarrassing.
That meant a lot to me.
I soaked it up and I'm good. Thanks. Okay, good. That's the way to do it. Nice to see you.
It is funny because I know that like some for some for me anyway, sometimes and I have friends who host podcasts and I have people that I admire who if they ask me to be on I'll come and do it. And it's fun because you get to have a real conversation. I mean, of course there are people listening so it's a little different than the conversation we might have alone. But you really get to have. I mean, there's and there's nobody.
bringing food and there's none of that stuff that cluttered the mind when you do. And I like that.
My first time I really spoke to Conan was on his podcast. And we had a great conversation and we
become friends since then. I don't know if this is true for you, but I don't hang out with guys.
You don't? No, I have great work relationships. I love going to work and hanging out with friends
and doing something together. And I love them and I will love them forever. And so it is a relationship.
But, you know, do you want to go have a beer?
No, I want to go home to marry, you know, to be honest.
Well, I remember.
So this is wonderful.
I think maybe you mentioned this to me when we were talking about the podcast on the show that one of the reasons you're doing it is because you don't get to see Woody Harrelson anymore.
Yeah.
Still don't, by the way.
You see that little sign, Ted Danson and Woody Harrell sometimes we're thinking about crossing that off and saying rarely.
Yeah, because, yeah.
You know, Woody's all over the place.
He doesn't like to be pinned down.
But he's also working nonstop, which is working.
He is working a lot.
Woody and I are friendly.
Woody came over to my house once.
And this was really one of the funniest things that ever happened to me.
I have to say.
I love Woody's stories.
I like to cook, as I mentioned.
And I was, I know Woody is a vegan.
And so I was prepared for that.
And it was Woody and Owen Wilson were coming over.
It was the afternoon.
It was a rare, like, after.
noon visit. I was like, you know what? I got a pizza oven. I'm going to make these guys some pizzas.
So I fire up the pizza oven and they come over and they're a lot of fun.
They're immediately they're like competing with each other.
Yeah, yeah. Very competitive.
It's just like, you know, it's really like, it's remarkable. They're like children adults, you know.
And Woody is talking to my wife and I'm out in the backyard cooking and he says,
hey, do you mind, what's the address?
I want to order Dominoes.
This is Woody.
It's Woody.
And Molly says, what?
And he said, yeah, I just want to give me the address.
I can order Domino's?
And she says, listen, I just have to tell you, Jimmy's going to be really upset if you order
dominoes.
He's very serious about his pizza and, you know, he's cooking for you.
and Woody and Owen like looked at each other
like he's gonna be upset
they didn't understand at all
Yeah
Turn out they wanted to order the game dominoes
Somebody to bring a game of dominoes over
And that this is like pre-instacart
So even the idea of ordering
A game was alien to us
And luckily it turned out to just be that
But you were making the vegan
He's past vegan
He's in the air.
Yeah, then I learned that he wasn't even eating bread.
But I think just to be courteous, he did eat, he did eat some of it.
Yeah, I don't know what he eats, but he manages to find something.
I have a prank going at work right now, and I feel comfortable sharing this with you because by the time...
Because that guy or girl won't ever listen to this podcast.
No, but by the time you put this out, I think it will be over.
It's getting close to being over already, but we got these two guys at our show, both writers, Danny and Josh, and they're very good friends.
Danny's kind of a snappy dresser.
He's a skaw kid, and he puts a lot of thought into his dress.
Josh does not.
And Josh got promoted, and Danny said, you know, Josh, maybe want to start.
dressing a little nicer and Josh was offended by this and Danny stuck with it and he said
you know it's like what I should dress like you and he's like no but you know just start you
know look like an adult rather than a college kid you know so now I spent the next couple of
months studying Danny's clothing and purchasing every item of clothing that he owns
duplicating it ordering it stockpiling it I go
away for the summer. We come back for the summer. And now we get a tip every morning of what Danny's
wearing to work. And Josh wears the identical outfit. And we're on day three of this now. And Danny has
lost his mind. Total innocence? He knows he's been prank, but not how. He is certain that I'm behind
this somehow. And he's threatened to sue. And he's become very paranoid accusing various people in his
life of being in on it. He can not understand what's going on and how we know what he's wearing.
We're looking at his ring cam is the real answer. And as he exits? As he exits his home.
So that's a scramble to get it all. It is a scruiting. Well, no, because we were storing it all
in my dressing room at the office. So he comes into work and he chains into whatever Danny's
wearing that day. And then we converge at rehearsal. And Danny looks at Josh, who sits next to me on
stage and goes, what the fuck is going on here?
That's great.
It's real psychological warfare.
It's kind of a win-win because Josh gets new outfits and Danny learns not to trust people.
Yeah.
We have fun.
You're good friends with John Krasinski.
You know what?
Honestly, that 1130 at night meal thing was mostly for John, who lived across the street from me
for a long time and he would come home for everyone's like.
and go, you got anything to eat?
And I'd be like, like, he was my son.
I'd be like, sit down at the counter.
Pull out the garlic and start cooking.
I love him.
I miss him, too.
I haven't seen him for a while.
Did he ever tell you that George Clooney,
we'll get off this kick in a minute.
George Clooney, the definition of crazy fans,
this is the topic of this story.
Yeah.
He's making leatherheads with George.
and they're in a small town somewhere in the south or something
and they've kind of taken over Main Street
as they want to do movie companies
and it's lunch
they have blocked the traffic
and they call lunch
and George is being walked over by
I don't know security or something back to his trailer
this is all starting to happen in the same moment
John's across the street
starting to walk to the case
and they release traffic.
And that moment then takes place
where George is walking.
And a car, a lady, a soccer mom, normal,
you know, maybe in a SUV,
drives by and sees George and screams,
George, opens the door,
runs around towards George
is tackled or restrained by
I mean because she's really over the top
by security
she's not put the car
in you know park so the car
is still driving down the street with the door open
some smart fast-thinking AD
runs after the car
leaps into the moving car
slams the brake on
turns around
and there's a baby
in a baby seat in the back of this car.
That's how crazed that woman was
to see George Clooney
that she ran out of a moving car
with her child still in the back seat.
Isn't that the most astounding kind of fan story?
And it wasn't like John was the baby
or anything like that?
No, no.
Just the witness.
Yeah, I think George Clooney has that effect on people.
Yeah, although that child should be taken away from that woman.
I mean, no matter how much she loved, George Clooney.
It would have been interesting to describe here her conversation with her husband at night.
Yeah.
Wow, that's crazy.
Yeah, I don't get anything like that.
I've never had that.
No, right.
No.
Okay, my turn.
Mary and I talk about you a lot.
Oh.
When we watch and see you, you are very funny.
Thank you.
You are very funny.
You're very real and approachable and genuine, whether you are or not,
you certainly come across that way.
And the courage you have when you share your personal life,
your sadnesses, your things,
and that makes you so accessible.
And then the courage you have to take on things that are just wrong.
And people, some of us, you know, are trying to look the other way,
and you look directly at it and you go after it,
whether it's this administration or what.
and that courage is really admirable.
I really admire you.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that.
I don't think of it as courage.
I think of it as just obvious.
I think of it as having really no choice,
but to talk about these things and to say these things.
You know, just the way I was brought up,
I think it makes perfect sense.
It especially bothers me being brought up Catholic
in a very positive Catholic environment
that Christianity has been co-opted
and perverted in such a way
and that I find especially upsetting
and that I think about
what Jesus would think of this stuff
and I mean it seems pretty plain
that he wouldn't think it's great
that he wouldn't prove of
nannies being
yanked out of the park
and thrust into a van
to be returned to their home countries
because their paperwork is not in order.
That just all really seems very obvious to me.
And I think that it is to almost,
I think it is to most people,
but it's become this us versus them.
It's become almost like sports
where I root for the red team
and you root for the blue team
and everything the blue team does
is good and everything the red team does is bad and vice versa.
And I just sometimes, I hope, and maybe foolishly, that it will resonate with at least those
people who don't have their minds completely made up.
Yeah, I don't know.
I keep asking people sometimes on this podcast, you know, how's your heart?
How are you dealing with this?
I mean, it feels like you have a platform to draw attention to it and do it in a humorous way.
So that must relieve some of the pressure on your heart, but it still just feels like,
and I don't know whether my, I don't know what to do is reminiscent of other people
that let things go too long around the world throughout history.
And then all of a sudden we're in a really bad place.
I don't know.
Well, I don't know what to do either.
but I think we start by acknowledging the truth and you know it's interesting when you know people when you get to know people like for instance like when Ellen came on television right most people in the Midwest I shouldn't say this but there a lot of people who are watching that show in Midwest maybe didn't know somebody who was openly gay right right and so they are again
gay marriage. They see it as, you know, against their religion or whatever, for whatever reason.
And they're against it. But then they get to know somebody like Ellen. And they go, well, she seems
okay. And then they say, well, now I feel like I have a friend who's, or, you know, one of their
children comes out and they suddenly have a different perspective on that. It's, it seems like the
perspective, this like, we've got to stop the immigrants, are coming from places.
that don't have a lot of them, you know, I mean, I know for me, and living here in L.A. for the last
30-something years, I know a lot of people who came to this country illegally, if you want to call it
that, and who are great people and who not only are they not a drain on our society, they're
contributing a great deal to our society. I mean, even if you look at this issue selfishly,
which I think a lot of people do, you know,
even if you look at it selfishly, it does not make sense to kick these people out.
Besides the fact that it's just like, how can you go to church on Sunday and think this is okay
to do to these families, to do to these people, and to be so cold about it and for their to be,
now, listen, okay, I get it.
There are things, you know, I would understand if I'm an immigrant who followed all the rules
and came into this country and, you know, jump through all the hoops that I might be someone,
resentful of somebody who, you know,
snuck in in some way or whatever.
But, you know, people are just looking for better lives.
They're just trying to improve their lives for their families, for themselves.
They come here.
They work hard.
They, when you want to believe it or not, they are paying taxes, you know,
everything that they, they buy is taxed.
And anybody who's not paying them in the proper way is part of the, you know, of, you know,
of whatever the problem is.
It's like if you choose not to pay regular income tax,
you know, Social Security tax,
your employees or whatever,
you have no right to say you need to be out of this country.
I mean, it's just, it's hypocritical.
It's, it's anti-everything that I personally believe.
It's heartless.
It's cruel more than anything.
It's just cruel, and I just don't get it.
And it has nothing to do with, I mean,
does immigration need to be fixed?
Yes.
and there was an attempt to do that in the Senate.
Yeah.
And then it was stopped because that wouldn't be good politics.
So it has nothing to do with trying to fix the problem.
Clearly there's an issue, but it isn't about fixing it.
Yeah.
And since when are we so, since when are Americans, I thought we don't follow the rules.
Like, you know, a gumption and you figure out a way to make it and you figure out a way to do this.
And you, you know, this is.
part of our personality as a country and what could be better than these people who really want to
work, who want to send money to their families, who want their children to be born in this country
and to be educated and to have a better life and to contribute. What's bad about that? I just don't
get it. I just don't get it. It just seems mean. It's just mean. And here we are. And here we
are. And it's, you know, it's, and it's going to pick up again. And you go, what can I do? And, you know, and a boy, I admire these people who will be out there and they see this happening and they intervene and they, you know, do their best to protect these less, these vulnerable people, their neighbors or whatever. I really admire that. Then they get arrested and then they have to deal with this. And it's just, it's just really, you know,
You know, this idea that, like, um, states' rights are as, you know, conservative ideal that the states have, you know, can make their own decisions.
It seems it's very, they cherry pick that, uh, yeah, a lot. And, you know, it's like, hey, listen, you know what,
I think if you polled Californians, um, we want these people in our country, in our state. You know,
we want them here. We are, we have positive experiences with them. We want them here. It doesn't make any sense to me.
nor i and then i look at myself ago and what are you going to do you know yeah yeah well it's tough
you know um i think well i think we've i think we've both done our best to make sure the right
people were in charge and um we didn't win unfortunately i don't feel like we've done nothing
i think that's the most important thing you can do is make sure there are decent people
running your your neighborhood your city your state and your country and
I think we do a pretty good job of that in California, but on a national level, we seem to have screwed that up.
And now most Americans, I think, would agree.
I mean, I think that, you know, if you were to believe these polls, I don't think people are happy with the way things are going.
I don't think anybody ever imagined when he talked about sending these criminals.
I mean, everybody's like, yes, if they're in MS-13, yes, of course, they shouldn't be here.
they shouldn't be committing crimes in this country.
But now we're like, you know, penalizing nannies.
Yeah.
You know, it's sick.
I should be asking, Stephen, not you.
But how did that go down?
I'm, I kind of peripherally heard about him being, you know, let go of and whatever
amount of time is left.
Walk me through that.
Can you?
I mean, sorry.
I mean, I can tell you what I guess.
You know, I don't think anybody will ever know what the real story is.
So we don't know for sure that he was fired because of a deal, a quid pro, crook kind of thing.
We don't know it for sure, but I do know, I mean, what I do know for sure is that some of the information that has been released by the people who let him go can't possibly be true.
There's no way he's losing $40 million a year.
There's no way it's even close to that.
I know how finances of late-night television shows work, and it's just ridiculous.
It doesn't make any sense at all.
So when you hear things that are obviously lies, you have to assume that there are more lies behind it.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's what I think.
I'm going to go on a show when we do publicity for a man on the inside coming up second season.
And I probably, I discovered that I'm, we're related.
You are.
We're distant cousins.
Wow.
Yeah.
Do you ever watched Finding Your Roots?
I've been on it, yeah.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know how at the end they say you are, you know, scientifically.
I could see that.
Yeah.
You guys have a similar, you have a.
I'm the slower.
Similar spirit, I think.
Yeah.
I'm a little slower.
He's the fact.
Fast joke. I'm the slow joke.
Do you know who I found out was my cousin on that show?
Who? Martha Stewart.
I love that.
Have you...
Have you... Have you been together?
You mean, what do you mean by that?
Have we been to...
No, have you had the opportunity to tell her that?
You know, it's funny. I was on her show, the show she did with Snoop Dog, the cooking show.
Yeah.
And I told him, I said, listen, this is something that I learned on finding my roots.
And it was not, it did not make the episode. It was on the cutting room floor.
I'd like to tell Martha, I want to surprise her with this information when I come out.
And I say, so please don't tell her, but I, you know, I want us to be a surprise.
And they were like, okay, absolutely.
I was like, don't, because, you know, I just don't tell her, okay?
We will not tell her.
Segment producer brings me out.
I step on stage.
She goes, so I hear we're cousins.
And I look over, the segment producer's just offstage.
And I look over, I just shoot an icy glare.
I was like, yeah.
Yes, we are.
Anyway, it's funny because my mother, like when Martha Stewart became a phenomenon in like the 80s, my mom couldn't get enough of it.
Like my mom was like making her own scotch tape, you know, that kind of stuff.
She was like, you know, really into it.
And I was like, oh, my mother with this Martha Stewart, it's ridiculous.
And then come to realize she's through my mom related to Martha Stewart.
So there might be something running through our blood that makes us interesting.
in this sort of stuff.
You were Arizona boy for a while.
I did.
I went to Arizona State.
I lived in Tucson,
as well.
Arizona State, what is that?
Tempe?
That's in Tempe.
Yeah.
It was a Flagstaff kid.
Yeah.
Would you go to NAU or you just grew up there?
No, just grew up there.
Yeah.
Wow.
Hey, I don't know.
I don't know too many people.
I have some friends from Flag, as we call it.
Did you go up to ski ever?
up in this. No, I'm not really a skier. But I would go up to visit my friends at N.A.U.
Yeah. A friend named Darrell Brown, who let me, when he was in college, I'd like to draw.
You know, I was going to be an artist when I was in college. And he said, yeah, well, you draw all over my room.
And so I drew all over all of the walls of his room. I put cartoons on the whole thing.
And him and his roommates, they loved it. And they had it for like three years. And then when they had to move out of there, I think he said they had to put like six coats of primer.
over it to get you know to be able to rent the place out again and what were you doing then were you
did you know that you wanted to be you know a radio host yeah you know what i did i i i i when i was
in a high school i was working a clothing store called miller's outpost do you remember that's yes
and um there's this other kid who worked there and he worked at the college radio station k unv in las
Vegas. And he said, you know, you're funny. You should come be on the radio. And I was like,
oh, I'd love to be on the radio. And at the time, I loved Howard Stern. My uncle would send me
cassette tapes of Howard. And I'd listen to them. And I said, I'd really love to be on the radio.
So he set me up with a meeting with the program director. And the guy hired me, he said,
what I want you to do is find local, like, people and who were well known in the area and make fun of
them. And I was like, okay, that sounds great. So I would call people who did local commercials,
you know, these guys and I have them on the show and, you know, lightly goof on them.
And the first time I did it, I found this guy named Fred, who was a used car dealer in the
area. And he'd say, if I can finance him and I view, I can finance you. You know, that was this
big tagline. So I had him on and, you know, we had a funny interview. And then I went home.
And my mom and my dad and my Aunt Chippy were all, like, sitting in the kitchen.
I walked in, they all clapped, you know, and I was like, wow, this is really, this is something.
Like, you know, I grew up in a very loud family where everyone was talking at once all the time.
And I think it was just like, like, oh, somebody's list.
Now, this is a way for them to listen to me, like, to actually have their undivided attention.
And I fell in absolute love with that.
I mean, still to this day, like going into a radio station,
is very exciting to me.
And I just, I started meeting like local dish jockeys and they would put me on the air here
and there.
And I wound up getting a radio show in Seattle with one of those local disc jockeys.
He said, I got a job doing a morning show in Seattle.
Do you want to come with me and be my sidekick?
And I went up there.
It was called the Me and Him show.
It was, he'd say, I'm me, he's him.
Let's go to the phones.
And we, you know, did this morning radio show.
And I was in love of it.
And I, I, I, that's what I did until.
I wound up on television.
And David Letterman.
David Letterman.
Huge for you, right?
And he started in radio.
That was also part of why I was interested in it.
Yeah, there's nobody.
Why?
What is it?
Everybody says this,
especially in your line of work that he was.
At my age, too, yeah.
Yeah.
Because Johnny Carson was such a fixture in our lives and so beloved,
not just by parents, but by everyone, right?
And it just seemed like that was Johnny Carson.
That's the, you know, late at night,
that's the greatest thing you could ever have.
And then this guy comes on afterwards,
and he's just doing like this weird version of the show.
And I remember thinking like, this is for me.
This is, I found it.
Whatever I was looking for, I didn't even know,
but I found it here on this show.
And the first person I ever talked about,
I think the first month I watched Letterman,
I didn't mention it to anyone.
Nobody.
I just stay up late and I was transfixed and I mentioned it.
My grandfather, actually, I went over my grandpa's house and he goes,
do you ever watch this guy Letterman?
My grandfather would stay up to like 4 o'clock in the morning,
watch TV and working on art projects.
And I was like, yes, you are you watching?
He's like, yeah, and we bonded over this love of Dave.
And then it became like a thing, like it's, you know,
I had late night with David Letterman.
like the chemistry book was my book cover.
My license played on my first car, said late L8 night.
And I never thought, like, I want to be a late night talk show host.
I never imagined there would be other late night talk show hosts other than Johnny and Dave.
This is before everybody started getting talk shows.
And I never even thought about being a right.
Like, it never occurred to me that you could be a right.
If I'd ever had that thought even one time, that would have been.
been my goal. But it never came to me. And I didn't know anybody in show business. You know,
I didn't, you know, we weren't from a show business family. And I, you know, didn't have any
connections or really no plan for college. College was like the 13th grade for me. You know,
I was a good student in high school. But, you know, like in August after I graduated, it's like,
so I guess I'll go to UNLV, you know, and they're like, yeah. And I went to UNLV for a year and
followed by Arizona State and got involved in radio.
And the way I wound up on television, I would have been perfectly happy being on the radio.
But I was on in L.A. I was on this radio station, K Rock, with these guys, Kevin and Bean, and they were very popular.
And people would listen to the show who were producing TV shows. And from time to time, I would get a call like,
hey, you're funny. Do you want to come audition for this or that or whatever? And I was always looking for a little extra money.
I made no money. So I would say, yeah. And I wound up on a game show called Wind
Ben Stein's Money. Right. I remember that. On Comedy Central. Wow. That's funny that, you know, and,
and that was it, that's how it started for me. Your show now, what, what was that moment when
somebody came to you and said, do you want to do this? Well, it was the same guy who hired me for
Win Ben Stein's money, like eight years later, Michael Davies. He was an executive at ABC. He's the
producer of who wants to be a millionaire, which I now host. I know. He's a, you know, he's just
a guy who recognized my talent when I was young, and he said, he went to Lloyd Braun,
who I think you know, who's the president of ABC at the time, and he said to Lloyd, listen,
I got this guy. I know you're looking for a late-night show, which none of us knew.
Who was in that slot?
No one.
No one, really. Nightline was in the slot.
And then Bill Maher's show, politically incorrect, followed it.
And then Bill Maher wound up upsetting all the affiliates, and they wanted him off the year.
But the truth of the matter is, I think Bill likes to, you know, say he was, you know, he was sacrificed in the way that Colbert.
But the truth of the matter is they'd offered that slot to Letterman already, you know, and Letterman said, no, he went to CBS instead.
So they were in the market for something in that slot.
They wanted a, you know, a traditional late-night talk show in that slot, which nobody knew.
they were almost about to hire John Stewart.
And John and I have the same manager, James Baby Dal Dixon.
And James was about to close this deal for John to host the show.
And Michael said, I want you to watch a tape of this other guy.
And Lloyd watched the tape and he was like, I think this might be the guy.
And he brought the tape to Bob Eiger.
And Iger said, yeah, I think this might be the guy.
and they called me in for a meeting under false pretenses because they couldn't...
So did you know anything of this was going on?
I didn't know any of it. I knew none of it. And they called me in and they said they wanted
to meet with me about a Thursday night variety show, which I was not interested in. And they
said, come on, meet the president of ABC. I went in. We never talked about me doing a show.
He just asked me a bunch of questions about Letterman. And we talked about Letterman for
like 90 minutes. And then he decided that I was going to host the show. And I found out about it
because my wife happened to be friends with his secretary, who was married to my partner on
the air, Adam Carolla. And she called and said, hey, they're going to offer Jimmy the late night
talk show at ABC. She's like, they're going to offer you the late night talk show at ABC.
I was like, what late night talk show at A? There's no late night talk show there. But it's a very
strange thing because John and I had the same manager. Now he's in the difficult position.
of having to tell John, like,
you're not going to ABC,
but Jimmy is going to ABC.
And, you know,
that was a mistake, by the way.
They definitely should hire John.
If I'm in that position,
there's no question I hire John
a hundred times out of a hundred.
But I think the Bob later said,
Bob Eager, I said, like, what, you know,
what was it?
Well, why, this is quite a leap that you guys made.
I was, you know, I was on the man show.
I was doing football picks on, on Fox NFRA,
fell Sunday. Like, what was? And he goes, well, you were cheaper. And everybody laughed, but I knew he
wasn't kidding. Yeah. So that's, you know, just, sometimes it pays to be cheaper. And then you had,
you were handy, did somebody a very smart producer come along and guide you? How did you put together
that first night? We screwed everything. The first night was, we thought it, we thought we did well,
Looking back, I mean, like my vision of hell, like when I watch the good place, I think my
vision of hell is being forced to watch my first year of shows.
I hear you.
Because it is just as painful as anything could get for me.
It took us a long time to figure it out.
And we're very fortunate to get a long time to figure it out.
And somehow we wound up getting good ratings.
I still don't know how that was, but though they were good enough to keep us on the air,
even though I was causing trouble once every, like, two and a half months,
some major thing was happening.
That came out of your mouth?
Yeah, yeah.
Something that came out of my mouth, you know, and caused the whole thing.
And, you know, it was like just tumultuous.
And the show was live at the time.
You know, the first few years, the first couple of years we were on live.
We kept the title, Jimmy Kimmel, live, even though the show's not live, because we don't
want to change everything.
But didn't you, I read something that some guy, I can't remember the actor's name who
was so filthy.
or whatever, that they put in that delay.
The actor's name was Thomas Jane, and we had a delay, but he cursed so many times that
the delay only works once, and then it's got to catch up.
He cursed so many times that the affiliate said, this show is either going to be on tape or
it's not going to be on.
Oh, wow?
Yeah, and so we were forced to.
And then we said, okay, but we want the show to be as timely as possible.
So instead of taping from 9.05 p.m. to 10.5 p.m., which is what we did, we're going to tape from 8.05 p.m. to 9.5 p.m. This is on the West Coast, of course. And then the show will start airing the moment that we've rewrapped this show. So it was essentially live because we had no time to edit. But we could bleep if we needed to.
They could bleep. Yeah, yeah. You have bleepers. Standards of practices. Yeah. And we kept them very busy at that time.
Obviously, you did look back at that first year.
Yeah.
Do you recognize likable Jimmy or were you uptight Jimmy?
I think that's all I had.
But see, no, that's a big thing.
It is a big thing.
Yeah, it's probably the most important thing.
Yeah.
You're a nice man.
I think also there was an element of people feeling sorry for me
and like kind of rooting for me because I seem to be dying on television.
He's a nice kid.
I'm like, oh, all right, let's give him a chance.
He's drowning.
Yeah.
And your parents, were they just crazily happily for you?
It's weird for me because my dad at that time was the age I am right now.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
And I now try to imagine, like, one of my kids, like launching something like that and how, I just, I don't know.
They never seemed that nervous.
I don't know.
Somehow I bamboozled them.
to thinking that I knew what I was doing, but I didn't know what I was doing, and I would
pray that they canceled the show sometimes. I didn't want to quit because I didn't want to
disappoint all the many people who worked for me, but I couldn't, I was just, I couldn't do it
anymore. It was like, like, we didn't have guests many times. Now, keep in mind, this show
was on, you know, we're going on the air live at midnight at 12.05. And there were times where it was
5.30 in the afternoon, and we didn't have
guests for that night's show.
And I would just have to pick up the phone
and call my friends. And like, that's
not how you go into a show.
You know, like, you can't operate that way.
Because this wasn't an institution
that I inherited. This was just the
time slot that we filled, you know.
And so I would
have to, you know, sometimes we'd have
the same guests on, like,
you know, on a Wednesday and then
again the next Tuesday, you know,
because we just needed somebody.
And they were my friends or my girlfriend, Sarah Silverman.
I asked her to come on a lot.
I love her.
Yeah.
And, you know, we just go, David Allen Greer, Adam Carolla, Kathy Griffin, Anthony Anderson.
They were just on over and over and over again.
God bless them because I needed them.
And they were always ready at a moment's notice to come on.
And eventually it's stabilized.
and we figured out how to do it.
And you start building like running bits,
which helps keep you afloat
and all these things that we didn't have.
How did Frank?
My uncle Frank?
Uncle Frank come into being.
So my uncle,
he was actually divorced from my aunt Chippy,
who's my mom's sister.
And I always thought he was a character
and he was always just this funny presence in my life.
A policeman, right?
He was a policeman.
in New York for 20 years.
And then he retired.
They decided they were going to move to
Florida. They went to Florida.
They stayed with some friends. They put
a deposit on a house. They went back to
the friend's house. They looked out
in the backyard and there was an alligator in the swimming
pool. And my aunt chippy, we were living in
Brooklyn at the time. My aunt chippy said,
I didn't raise three daughters to have the
meeting by a fucking alligator.
And they decided
they lost the deposit and
decided to move to Las Vegas.
where he got a job as a security guard, first at the Frontier Hotel, and then later at
Caesar's Palace, he became, the Italian security guards at Caesar's Palace would almost
automatically get assigned to Frank Sinatra.
Was that back then?
Yeah, back then.
Oh, wonderful.
Yeah, this was like 1975, probably.
Yeah.
And he got assigned to Frank Sinatra, and my grandparents lived there with them.
They moved out there with them.
And, you know, our family's very close.
It was only a matter of time before we followed them out there.
And we did follow them out there in 1977.
And it was a great place to grow up.
It was exciting.
But I realized my Uncle Frank was this character.
I mean, he's just like fun.
Like he's his old man even when he was young, you know.
And I started putting him on the radio when I was on the radio.
Like if we do a show, if we go back to New York and do the show, he'd move back to New York.
I'd put him on.
And my, I remember my, I never was sure if other people.
would find him as funny as I did, but Kevin and being my co-workers just couldn't get enough of them.
You know, they just like, this guy's unbelievable. So when I started doing the show, I knew I would need
support. I knew I would need people to go to. And I called my Uncle Frank. Was he there day one there?
Yeah, he was there day one. I called him. I said, I want you to move out to L.A. He's living in New York,
working at St. Patrick's Cathedral as a security guard. I said, I want you to move to L.A.
and I want you to be a security guard on my show.
And he's like, he didn't understand what I was talking about.
He didn't understand that he was going to be on the air.
He just didn't get any, he just didn't know what I was talking about.
He was kind of open to it, but somewhat reluctant.
And what really clinched the deal was he found out that the bank where he had a checking account
had a branch near the apartment my cousin had found for him.
So he's like, okay, so you don't want to transfer his bank.
count. He moved to LA. And he was a hit immediately. He was like, people loved him immediately.
He was- I did. Funny, right? I did. I probably was trying to look hip like I knew or something. But
the first time I went out of my way to greet him as I came in or something. But from that on, he was so
genuinely nice to me. He was a very nice guy. I'm sure he was nice to literally everybody, but he was like
an ambassador. He only arrested six people in 20 years.
he would just tell them the, like, he didn't want to arrest people.
He would say, like, you know, don't do this again.
Get out of here.
One of the arrest was by accident because the guy had stolen a lamp from a store
and he was running out with the lamp and my uncle Frank happened to be on his beat.
And he's like, stop, stop with that lamp.
And the guy froze and he goes, he goes, drop the lamp and get out of here.
And the guy wouldn't run because he thought my uncle Frank.
was going to shoot him.
And my uncle Frank's like, he was forced to arrest the guy.
Never gave a ticket.
He had rules like, this was New York, too.
New York, he'd say, I never give a ticket to a woman, never give a ticket to a parent,
never give a ticket.
And by the end of his list of qualifications, there was nobody that got to say.
He was like, never give a ticket to anybody driving.
It was like, it was crazy.
So he was a character.
and he was loved immediately by everyone.
By everybody.
And then he was joined by Guillermo,
who is my security guard now,
who I adore.
Who is, you know, also a treasure.
Very funny.
Very funny and genuinely funny.
I mean, people don't even realize how funny he is.
Like, he does impersonations of everybody we work with.
They're hilarious.
They're like, Guillermo's version of our standards and practice guy.
Guillermo's version, you know, you name it.
How did you find Guillermo?
He was in the parking lot.
God sent him to me.
He was in the parking lot.
Our announcer Dickie and our warm-up guy, Don,
knew him from just mingling,
you know, as they didn't have a lot of work to do in the day.
So they'd chit-chat with Guillermo,
and they're like, this guy's funny, you know?
And Guillermo would sleep in our announcer's car
while he was supposed to be working.
He'd say, hey, leave the keys.
And he would take a nap.
Well, he was supposed to be guarding the parking lot.
lot during the show because everybody's in watching the show. So he sleeped that. And they tricked him
one day. I got a new car. And Dickie and Don are like, hey, we want to check out the car. Give us
the keys. So I give him the keys. I'm like, I'll be down in five minutes. They go down and
they say to Guillermo like, hey, come sit in Jimmy's new car. Check it out. He doesn't know
I'm coming down. I come down. There's this guy, security guard that I've never seen because he's
from the other lot sitting in my car. What's going on? And he looks terrified. And I look at him
like he's terrified and I was like there's something funny happening here I don't know what
and they're dying laughing because you know they've done this and uh I had a bit um that we were
going to do on the show or Michael Jackson's chef was selling a cookbook he was he'd written a cookbook
and um he was a Latino guy and we're going to do bit and I said well let's get that security guard
to play the chef and it was a live bit and Guillermo comes on the air and he is so
terrified because he's obviously never been on television before. He's white as a sheet and he's just
terrified and everybody's dying laughing. The name of the book was the way you make my meals,
you know, after the Michael Jackson's and the way you make me feel. And he's trying to deliver
his lines. And it's, I remember thinking, I remember this so vividly thinking during the bit,
this guy's going to be on a lot. Like this is the first time we've seen this guy. He's going to be
on the show all the time. And now,
it's, you know, 23 years later, and he's on the show every night. Boy, his life changed.
It did, yeah.
Hugely, rightfully. It did. It did. I watched a bit on YouTube this afternoon of him going down
that plastic, clear plastic slide on the 80th or 90th floor. He's very afraid of heights,
and every once in a while, we have him confront his fears. Yes, but he was very funny.
You know, it's funny with him because we do have him confront his fear sometimes, and they say,
once you confront your fears and, you know, you're not afraid.
He's still just as afraid, maybe even more now.
He doesn't like snakes.
He doesn't like heights.
He doesn't like, once we put him on a diving board on the show wipeout, they had like a diving
board is 25 feet in the air or something.
He climbs reluctantly, hours it took for them to convince him to get up there.
He climbs up.
He goes out on the diving board.
He lays down on the diving board.
He's like, I can't move.
And hours go by.
We're like, jump off the board.
He will not move.
he won't climb down.
He's just laying on his diving board.
It was insane.
But he's great.
He's really, like, become one of my best friends.
You know, what's cool is to hear about your family
and how much clearly they meant to you
and you to them and all of that.
I think that's what you create, too, on your show.
I think that's one of the things that comes across
is you are family.
You appreciate family.
You understand it.
You literally have it.
visually for all of us to see.
I have a great family.
Yeah, they always say this show is like a fan loaner.
Our show is, yes, literally a family.
And like when my uncle Frank died,
there were so many stories about how involved he was
in almost everyone at our show's lives.
I mean, like, he knew everything about them,
and it was crazy.
And like, I didn't even realize it until we spent like four hours
eulogizing him, how involved he was.
because he was just there every day and he, like, cared about people and P.A.s would drive him home.
And he was just like, it's just such a character. Like, he went to a, we all went to a wedding of one of our writer's assistants at the time.
And it was downtown L.A. And Uncle Frank was excited because he was going to take the train. And he was always on time, always more than on time, hours early.
I mean, just like, and he wanted to take the train downtown to go to this wedding. So he takes the train. And he tells me the story, because,
I drove there, and he tells me this story.
He says, I'm on the train, and he sees this man in a wheelchair.
And the guy's in a wheelchair, and he's sitting on the train with a cup.
My uncle Frank gets out $10, and he walks over to him, and he puts the money in the guy's cup.
And the guy looks up at him and goes, that's my coffee.
Guy was not homeless.
He was just in the wheelchair.
Oh, I'm sorry, buy yourself a new coffee.
At the end of the week, my uncle Frank, at the beginning of the week,
he would take $200 out of the ATM to exactly $200.
At the end of the week, he wanted to have no dollars in his wallet and start over with a
fresh $200.
And so whatever he had left, which was often, you know, $147, he would just give out to people
It just gives to people on the street, people at the show, you know, low-paid workers, you know, whatever, just hand out money.
Wow.
Kind of an angel.
Yeah, really a character.
Who's left in your, I hate to put it that way.
Oh, my Aunt Chippy is one of the funniest people in the world.
My cousin, Sal, works on the show, my brother, my cousin Mickey, my aunt Chippy, who is an unbelievable character, and we pull pranks on her.
I've been doing stuff to her since I was a little boy, really, like really since.
I was loading her cigarettes, putting little explosives in her cigarettes when I was like 12, you know,
and it continues.
Now I have, like, budgets to really deal.
I don't know, maybe you've seen, but it's a pretty popular prank, something I've been worked on for years.
I got a Waymo, and I had an actor playing the driver.
You know, those cars, driverless cars, pick her up at the airport.
Now, she doesn't know about a driverless car, you know.
So, I have the driver come, he opens her door, he gets her in the car, he says,
will you, excuse me, I have to go use the restroom.
She's like, yeah, go ahead and, you know, whatever, closes the door, and off goes the car with
no driver.
And she goes, why, she is going just absolutely for her.
Cameras mounted, everyone.
Customer service reps, you know, coming over the speaker.
She's just screaming and just doesn't know what is going on.
And that to me is when I'm at my happiest.
It really is.
It's my happiest.
Does it take time for her to forgive you or no?
She,
you know,
we're in a perpetual,
she will never forgive me for all this stuff,
but she loves me.
That's what's most important.
That's so cool.
Yeah, I love doing stuff.
Once we did,
we had,
when her daughter and my cousin Mickey was pregnant,
she'd never seen a sonogram before
because Mickey is the first of her daughters
to have a baby,
and she just never seen it.
And so Mickey,
said, do you want to come see my sonogram?
She's like, yeah, I'd love to, you know, whatever.
She's not seen this technology, she doesn't know anything about technology, you know.
So we made, we had a whole fake, we set up a whole fake sonogram thing.
We had a monitor with like videos in there and like, she was looking at this fetus and she's, you know, tearing up.
And then the fetus starts doing jumping jacks.
And then the fetus starts doing karate and giving her the middle finger.
And she's just like, she's going nuts.
Then the fetus is me.
yeah we do a lot of fun stuff with her yeah can i ask you how billy is billy's great thank you for asking he is
my son billy is eight years old now he's had three open heart surgeries and one arthroscopic surgery
we don't think he'll need any more surgeries which is great and he's just one of the funniest
weirdest little people i mean he's just like non-stop i know everyone thinks their kids are funny but
like I go to school and everybody's like, uh, this kid is really funny on this kid.
You know, my dad who's seen a lot of like, you know, grandkids and whatever.
He goes, this one's the weirdest one.
It's just.
And I'm a grandfather now.
I have a three-month-old granddaughter from my oldest daughter.
Yeah.
Had a baby, which she told us she was not going to have any kids.
She's not interested in having kids.
And I was disappointed.
but like, okay, well, you know, that's your decision.
And she came over with one of those little printouts of a fetus.
And it took me like a good four minutes to, you know, to digest it and to figure out what was going on.
So now Billy is an eight-year-old uncle, Uncle Billy.
Only it likes to be called Uncle Bill.
Uncle Bill.
In every other scenario, he's Billy.
As far as his uncle ship, he is Bill.
That's great.
We don't know why, but it's funny.
And how old is your grand daughter?
Her name's Patty, and she's three months old.
Isn't it just?
Super cute.
Yeah, very exciting.
Yeah.
I have an 11-year-old daughter, Jane, who's funny.
And my son, Kevin, who will be 32 any day now.
And he's great.
We have great kids.
I'm lucky.
Yeah.
And the older ones adore the younger ones?
They do.
And vice versa.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's great.
Yeah.
I know.
It's like something.
I didn't think about it that, you know, I didn't think about that part of it.
But it's really, yeah, it's very special.
We went on a trip just recently, just got back.
There were nine of us, just kids, their mates, and four grandkids flew to go see Charlie McDowell
and his wife, Lily, who were in Paris because she's shooting Emily in Paris.
Nice.
And it was, they were like 11 of us, the table.
We're about to take a trip like that.
that 17 of us were going to Ireland for my dad's 80th birthday,
all going to spend time with our Irish family,
my dad's family, who he tracked down on Ancestry.com
and got in touch with and now has become very close with it.
Every weekend, he's got, we have Irish cousins visiting L.A.
It's like every weekend someone is at their house visiting,
and they just get such a kick out of it.
And they live on, like, the land that our family lived on in the 1700s.
It's crazy.
Oh, wow.
That's amazing.
I've never been there, so I'm excited.
Did you trace back with Skip Gates following back to that family?
Oh, yes, yes, he did.
You should take that with you so they can see it.
Yeah, well, I've shared it all with them already.
Yeah, yeah, we're, we've, you know, it's, it's, the internet has changed that, you know,
It's like, you really can have, just, you can be in close contact with people who live
5,000 miles away.
Amazing.
I'm so grateful for you to come and talk to me.
You're so sweet to be here after a full day's work.
I think I actually asked you if I could be on the show, right?
They didn't tell me that.
Well, I told you.
They like me to be scared and nervous.
I asked you when I said, I didn't ask, I offered myself up, and then it was a long time.
I was like, oh, maybe he doesn't want me.
So I was grateful when you...
I just can't fathom.
I don't know you that well personally, but I'm a great admirer of yours.
Not just your work as an actor, but you as a human being.
And Mary, you guys seem to be great people.
And everyone I know that knows you confirms that enthusiastically, including my friends, John and Emily.
My former across-the-street neighbors, John and Emily.
Yeah.
who I adore as well.
This seems like a good note to go on.
Okay.
All right.
Why not?
Thank you.
And please, please, please pass on our respect to your wife.
I will do that.
She'll be very happy to hear it.
It's huge. It's for real.
Hopefully I won't forget it on my 11-minute drive home.
I'll call her.
Okay.
Huge thanks to Jimmy Kimmel for making time for us.
You can catch him on.
Jimmy Kimmel Live weeknights on ABC at 1135 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. I hope we can count on that
for years to come. That's all for our show this week. Special thanks to our friends at Team Coco.
If you enjoyed this episode, send it to someone you love. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app
and maybe give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts if you're of a mind. If you like
watching your podcasts, all our full-length episodes are on
on YouTube. Visit YouTube.com slash Team Coco. See you next time, where everybody knows your name.
You've been listening to Where Everybody Knows Your Name. You've been listening to Where Everybody
Knows Your Name with Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson sometimes. The show is produced by me, Nick Leow,
our executive producers are Adam Sacks, Jeff Ross, and myself. Sarah Federovich is our supervisor,
producer. Engineering and mixing by Joanna Samuel with support from Eduardo Perez. Research by
Alyssa Graal. Talent booking by Paula Davis and Gina Battista. Our theme music is by Woody
Harrelson, Anthony Jen, Mary Steenbergin, and John Osborne.
