Conan O’Brien revealed to Eric Idle on a recent episode of the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast (via Entertainment Weekly) that Robin Williams cold called him after NBC fired him as host of “The Tonight Show.” O’Brien took over the late night show from Jay Leno in 2009, but he was infamously fired after seven months. The network decided to dump O’Brien and bring back Leno.
“I was lucky enough to have some great interactions with Robin Williams before he passed,” O’Brien said. “One of the most memorable examples to me is when I went through my whole ‘Tonight Show’ debacle. Finally, the show is done, and I don’t know if I have a career anymore. What am I gonna do next? I’m lying on the floor in the living room of my house, and my phone rings, and I pick it up, and it’s Robin Williams.”
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“I don’t even know how he got my phone number,” O’Brien continued. “[Williams asked,] ‘How are you holding up, chief?’ And he said, you know, ‘You’re gonna be fine, you’re gonna be great.'”
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Williams then instructed O’Brien to go down to the local bike shop in Santa Monica because Williams had set up a bike for O’Brien to rent for the day. Both gentlemen were avid bikers at the time.
“And I said, ‘What?'” O’Brien remembered. “And he said, ‘No, no, no, just head on down there. Ride around, you’ll feel better.’ And I went down and it was a Colnago, which is a very nice bike. And he said, ‘I told him to paint it in all these crazy Irish colors.’ I get down there and it’s the ugliest — I mean, it was just greens and shamrocks and everything. And he was like, ‘You’re going to like that bike, chief. Don’t worry about it.'”
It turns out clearing his head and biking around Santa Monica is just what O’Brien needed in the moment. He added, “I thanked [Robin] many, many times. I just couldn’t believe that he was thinking about me.”
Idle was one of Williams’ close friends and told O’Brien that such a kind gesture was “typical” of Williams, who died in August 2014. “He would put a lot of effort into making you feel better,” Idle added. “That’s fantastically typical Robin. That generosity and kindness combined with the wit of the man is not a common combination.”
It was Williams who taught Idle to be generous to fans, the Monty Python comedian admitted. “I would just tell them to fuck off and they would laugh and go away, you know?” Idle explained of his fan interactions. “And that became a thing. Then I watched Robin and his empathy, remembering that this is somebody’s moment in their life and it’s a big moment in their life because they’ve waited, they love you, they want this moment. So if you are shit or dismissive, it’s a nasty memory.”
Listen to the full “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast episode with Idle here.
