{"id":659763,"date":"2026-05-09T12:18:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T12:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/659763\/"},"modified":"2026-05-09T12:18:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T12:18:18","slug":"stephen-colbert-says-theres-no-reason-to-trust-him-with-lord-of-the-rings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/659763\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Colbert says there’s “no reason” to trust him with Lord Of The Rings"},"content":{"rendered":"

With less than a month between now and the May 21 finale date<\/a> for\u00a0The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, its titular host has begun one last race over the media hurdles. That includes (per a new interview with\u00a0THR<\/a>) a whole lot of very careful talk about the politics of his ouster at CBS\u2014noting that he had \u201ca very cuttable throat\u201d if the network was looking for sacrifices to the current White House and\/or corporate regimes\u2014but also some more detailed conversations about his next gig<\/a>, writing a film set in the universe of his beloved\u00a0Lord Of The Rings.<\/p>\n

Specifically, Colbert was asked the fairly loaded question of\u00a0why\u00a0fans of the franchise should trust a guy whose last non-talk-show-scripting work was the Strangers With Candy\u00a0movie in 2005<\/a> 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, \u201cI mean, there\u2019s no reason to.\u201d He went on to acknowledge \u201cThere\u2019s no value in me addressing that because all you can do as\u2014I\u2019ll use a loaded term here\u2014an 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.\u201d Colbert also acknowledged that \u201cluckily, I don\u2019t have to do this alone,\u201d pointing out that he\u2019s working with longtime Lord Of The Rings\u00a0writer Philippa Boyens, who co-wrote all of Peter Jackson\u2019s films in the franchise. Colbert: \u201cI will just say that every moment has been a joy so far.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in the interview, Colbert lightly touched on CBS\u2019s claims that he was losing them massive amounts of money by making his show\u2014\u201dUm, it came as a surprise\u201d\u2014discussed Byron Allen taking over his old timeslot<\/a>, and reminded viewers that\u00a0he\u2019s\u00a0actually fairly conservative, it\u2019s just reality that\u2019s gotten radically right-wing: \u201cI\u2019m 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\u2019t, which is very destructive. That\u2019s like alcoholism. That\u2019s reaching for a drug that\u2019s really a poison all the time in order to give you the worldview that you hope.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With less than a month between now and the May 21 finale date for\u00a0The Late Show With Stephen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":659764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-659763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=659763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}