James Corden Tour and Reflections – The Hollywood Reporter

“What will I miss? I’ll miss all of it,” sighed James Corden, the host of CBS’ The Late Late Show with James Corden — which will air its final episode on Thursday night — while he gave The Hollywood Reporter a tour of his show’s premises last week. “I sort of can’t quite take in the idea that next week none of this will be here. They’re just gonna sort of take it apart, this thing that we built. You’ve certainly come at an emotional time.”

Corden is ending his eight-year, 1,196-episode run at the same location where it began when he took over The Late Late Show from Craig Ferguson: in studio 56 on the historic lot formerly known as CBS Television City (now just Television City) at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly in Los Angeles. It’s a place that has become a second home to the London native, who insists that he still can’t quite believe where his life has led him.

“I will always be genuinely blown away that this was something that I ever even got asked to do,” admits the 44-year-old, who was previously best known as an actor on British TV and on the stage in London and New York. (He won the best actor in a play Tony Award in 2012 for his turn in One Man, Two Guvnors.) “I don’t look like I should be hosting a late night talk show. I’m not a broadcaster. And I’ve never done a stand-up set in my life.”

His entire experience in late-night TV, he emphasizes, has been a nonstop whirlwind that has left little time for reflection. “I said to my wife the other night, ‘At some point in August we’re probably gonna be at a pub in London [to which they will soon be relocating with their three young children], and I’m gonna say, ‘The last thing I remember is us looking into each other’s eyes and going, OK, let’s move to Los Angeles.’ Can you fill me in on what happened since then?’ Because it’s a bit of a blur.”

What’s on Corden’s agenda for Friday, the first day in nearly a decade that he won’t have to think about his show? “I imagine I’m gonna have to hydrate — we’re a drinking bunch,” he says with a chuckle, before adding more seriously, “And then I think it’s just gonna be good to have some silence for a minute. It’s been quite a loud eight years. So I just have to lean into that, embrace that and try to let go of any semblance of ego.”

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Here are James Corden’s thoughts on several spots at The Late Late Show.

Office

“It’s been my office since day one, although on day one it wasn’t quite as furnished because I was so convinced that the show would be pulled off the air.”

Office fridge

“There’s a lovely stain of some sort of mold here. This is chocolate wheat, a ginger shot and some champagne — there was more champagne, but I took it home ’cause we were having a little soiree. Here at The Late Late Show, it’s very important to have booze around. Regular watchers of the show will know that we are partial to a Thursday drink. I think it’s safe to say that we are the biggest drinkers in late night, probably the biggest drinkers in Los Angeles!”

Office couch

“This [lying on his back with an eye mask] is how you’ll normally find me about 20 minutes before the show. It starts as meditation and ends in a snooze. I could sleep in a wheelbarrow.”

Office walk-in closet

“We made this because my suits used to be in my toilet, which didn’t always feel great. These are the suits that I wear for the show, and the shoes, and the T-shirts that I’ll wear for Carpool Karaoke and stuff. I’ve really committed to a black polo and jeans.”

Office bathroom

“This [a mechanical toilet] was a birthday present from the executive producer of the show, Ben Winston. And this shower has been used by Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Harry Styles. If work really dries up, I will release that footage.”

Green room with bar and bartender

“None of this was here before we started — it was actually just corridors with quite a lot of damp in the ceiling — so we went to the president of the network at the time, Nina Tassler, and said, ‘Could we get some money to redo the dressing rooms and make a green room that feels like a place you might want to hang out?’ And she said, ‘Oh, I don’t think we’ve got the money for that.’ And we said, ‘Ah, it’s a shame, because we were going to do these dressing room check-ins during the show, and this is going to look not great.’ And she said, ‘Oh, well, if it’s part of your set, you’ve absolutely got the money.’”

Entrance to green room

“We decided to put our Emmys here so that they were visible from every dressing room so that when guests came they would hopefully think, ‘Oh, OK, shit, people watch this.’ Even though they don’t.”

Dressing rooms

“I try to get dressed and made-up early because I like to come and see the guests before the show. It’s actually often my favorite part of the day, because you really just get to chat and hang for a little bit. I think the guests get put at ease slightly and feel like you have a rapport before the show’s gone on.”

Corridor linking green room to show set

“Here is the last point where I read the monologue with all the writers, and where we’ll make our last-minute changes. Then I come down the hall. We’ve developed a slight ritual where anybody who is waiting in this corridor, we have to do a high-five. And the first person often will be a security guard who is often on his phone, as I think all the best security guards are. Then I meet Alan, who’s one of our stage crew, and there will be two canned waters, pre-cracked by Alan, and we say, ‘Cheers, Governor!’”

Behind the curtain

“This is where I stand and wait for the show to start every day. I have a sneaky suspicion sometimes that my [late] granddad might be with me, so I do this [opens palms to the sky] and say, ‘Be with me’ while I wait for Reggie [Watts] to introduce me.”

Monologue mark

“My monologue mark here is the West Ham United club badge. That’s what I stand on. It’s beneath, as it’s beneath most teams in the Premier League at the moment! It’s a view I’m going to miss hugely.”

Desk

“I’ve got to be quiet so they won’t hear, but I’ve put together boxes for everybody who works on the show. This [a desk which looks exactly like his regular desk] is not my regular desk. The original desk that we’ve used for almost all 1200 shows, I’ve had it chopped up into 170 pieces and attached a note to each saying, ‘It wasn’t my desk, it was ours.’ Because that’s very much how I look at the show.”

On and inside desk

“[On the desk] we have this bell, for reasons I’ll never fully understand. It’s been on the desk since show one, and no one can really explain why. [Inside the desk] we’ve got some throat lozenges, mints, something reminding me that it’s [a colleague’s] birthday, and a pair of eyeglasses that have been in here for about six years now from some random bit that we did where I put glasses on. The best thing in here is this button that was a birthday gift from Rob Crabbe and Ben Winston, the execs of the show. Every time I press it, this happens [the song ‘This Is How We Do It’ blares from the studio’s speakers]. They immediately regretted it, because what they didn’t realize when they gave it to me is that it costs $6,000 every time it’s broadcast on the show.”

Waiting area for guests

“This is the spot where every guest waits before they enter the show, and we use footage from here to bump in and out of breaks. They’ll also do a photo here in the photo booth, and then they’ll pin their photo up here on the wall, and then they’ll sign the wall. When we started, these walls were blank. And now look: every single inch of them is covered. It’s an incredible thing. Allison Janney is the guest who has been on the most, and these are every one of her pictures. The last one is her holding them all!”

Entrances for guests

“We have our guests enter through the audience, down these sets of stairs. I’ll let you into a secret: I’ve always hated it, but Ben Winston loves it. I don’t hate it, I just always feel slightly bad for the guests and terrified that someone’s going to fall — but no one has. Katie Couric pranked me and made it look like she fell, and ever since that day I’ve had slight PTSD.”

Guest seats next to desk

“Traditionally late night shows have guests seated on the other side of the desk and the host seated behind the desk. But I knew that I wanted very much to interact with Reggie, so I wanted the guests to not have their back to the band. So we decided, ‘Well, what we’ll do is we’ll put the desk here and the sofa here, and I won’t sit behind the desk.’ And also, we bring all the guests out at the same time, so hopefully it will feel like a cocktail party or something. I didn’t want it to feel like a job interview.”

The backdrop

“The thing I love most about our set is the backdrop, which I can’t take any credit for whatsoever. It’s 3D, which I love. We really wanted to have depth in the backdrop, rather than it being a screen. So we really painstakingly built everything [in the Hollywood skyline]. If we’ve got a guest on who’s promoting a movie, we’ll put their movie on this billboard. And then if there’s a band on, we put their billboards here in the Hollywood Bowl. When the show is over, I’m going to take home the Hollywood Bowl and that Lego mug.”

The studio and the audience

“The thing with this studio is it doesn’t have a very high ceiling compared to lots of TV studios. What we decided to do was actively make the ceiling lower — like, we pulled it in — because we knew we were following [David] Letterman’s show for about six weeks; and then I think we followed repeats of Hawaii Five-0, which was really helpful; and then we knew that Stephen [Colbert] was taking over and that Stephen’s show was coming from a big Broadway theater. So we would talk about, ‘Where would you go after the theater? Maybe you’d go to a bar.’ So we put a bar on the set. ‘Maybe you’d go to a jazz club or a comedy club.’ So we made the decision to bring all of the [non-auditorium-style] seats in front of the cameras with little lamps.”