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Interview with Craig Ferguson

Why Craig Ferguson Really Left Late Night

Kevin Fallon - Sept. 10, 2015 - Next Chapter - The Daily Beast


Nearly one year after leaving ‘The Late Late Show,’ late-night’s goofy rebel discusses his new comedy special, the real reasons he left his show, and how it feels to be free.


When Craig Ferguson first met Mick Jagger, at a hotel in Istanbul two decades ago, the Scottish comedian blurted out—and to this day he can’t fathom why—“You’re adorable!”


“That was really stupid,” Ferguson laughs, recalling the episode. “I wish I hadn’t done that.”


The former host of The Late Late Show and I are speaking in advance of the premiere of his new comedy special Just Being Honest, which airs Thursday night on EPIX and is his first major coming out since vacating his CBS late-night show last December after 10 years.


If that’s the case, it’s about 10 percent less honest than most of what we’ve come to expect from the star, who has made a career out of unexpected candor, authenticity, and a punk rock mandate to do the kind of comedy that he wants to do, traditions and decorum be damned.


His escapades with Jagger are a centerpiece of the special—the Rolling Stones front-man once enlisted Ferguson to pen a screenplay for him that was almost certainly a plagiarizing of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. “It’s a hell of a story, and I’d say about 90 percent true,” Ferguson says.


If that’s the case, it’s about 10 percent less honest than most of what we’ve come to expect from the star, who has made a career out of unexpected candor, authenticity, and a punk rock mandate to do the kind of comedy that he wants to do, traditions and decorum be damned.


Tune in on any given night of his Late Late Show tenure—on which you might have seen, say, a gay robot skeleton sidekick named Geoff dancing along with Ferguson and a pantomime horse—and you got a sense of his madcap rebel streak.


Rewatch his poignant 2007 monologue recounting his history of alcoholism and journey to sobriety, which culminates in a pledge not to ridicule Britney Spears at the height of her shaved-head meltdown. “Comedy should have a certain amount of joy in it,” he said. “It should be about attacking the powerful: the politicians, the Trumps, the blowhards”—how timely—“We shouldn’t be attacking the vulnerable.” Watch the whole 12-and-a-half minutes for a reminder of the power of his unrivaled confessionals.


Nearly one year after leaving ‘The Late Late Show,’ late-night’s goofy rebel discusses his new comedy special, the real reasons he left his show, and how it feels to be free.


Or revisit his 2009 interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, which won Ferguson a Peabody, for proof, as the awards organization noted, of Ferguson’s unique ability: insisting that “one of the silliest hours on television (what with the trademark hand puppets and skeleton robots) could also be one of the smartest.”


“I can’t envision a time where I would be able to do comedy where it’s like, ‘Hey, aren’t bananas weird?’ and such,” Ferguson says, as we talk about Just Being Honest continuing, as its title suggests, his grand tradition of public honesty, this time through the lens of aging (the joys of colonoscopies), nostalgia (partying with Mick Jagger), and a hatred of those shoes that look like feet. “All I can do is comedy I have a connection with. And I find it easy to access an emotional vein if I go with personal stories.”


As we freely talk, a rarity in the controlled world of show business, about how he’s fared in his year freed from the shackles of late-night—a “relief,” he says—and the reasons why he left, the title of his special becomes less of the apology for offending anyone that it might seem at first blush than it does a life motto.

***

“When you do a show on American broadcast television, not just American but any broadcast television, or maybe any television, there’s always an implication of please don’t offend the sponsor, please don’t upset the FCC, all that,” he says. “Though it was very loose—my late-night show was about as loose as you get on late-night television—there’s still a sort of institutionalized mindset that I developed, no one put it on me, but I developed in the sense that I better be careful.”


Just Being Honest, in which he warns the audience in the first moments that he is bound to offend each and every one of them and abounds with arias of four-letter words, serves as catharsis after his 10 institutionalized network years. Ferguson tees off on everything from transubstantiation—the Catholic belief that the biscuit turns into the body of Christ—to Kenny G.


It’s on the topic of “offense” that Ferguson launches into one of those ranting, impassioned—though always redeemable thoughtful and astute—monologues that were a highlight of his late-night run. “It seems to me that the climate of the day is that if you disagree with what someone thinks, you get called a fucking Nazi,” he says. “But I think the whole idea is that you can have evolving opinions about things.”


Nearly one year after leaving ‘The Late Late Show,’ late-night’s goofy rebel discusses his new comedy special, the real reasons he left his show, and how it feels to be free.


“Ranting” might, however, be the poorest characterization of Ferguson’s nature. It implies rage, or perhaps even bitterness, when instead the star’s career has always been marked by remarkable amounts of humbleness, gratitude for opportunities, a bit of contrition, and—that magic word again—honesty about all of it.


As he recounted in his 2009 memoir American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, he grew up chubby and bullied in a dodgy suburb of Glasgow—a childhood that makes a comedy career a thing of destiny—and played in a punk band called the Dreamboys with fellow now-successful actor Peter Capaldi, who encouraged him to try out comedy.


His rise on the comedy circuit coincided with a descent to rock bottom addiction. On Christmas Day 1991 he planned to end his life by jumping off London’s Tower Bridge, but was distracted by a friend who offered him a glass of sherry. Rehab soon followed, and the specificity with which Ferguson divulges all of this has influenced his fans to quit drinking themselves.


The rest of the ’90s were good to Ferguson. He was steadily employed as scene-stealing boss Nigel Wick on The Drew Carey Show from 1996 to 2004, and the next year succeeded Craig Kilborn as the host of The Late Late Show. With his unorthodox approach to the genre, it quickly became the case that more than his brogue set him apart from his late-night peers.


His interviews with guests were similarly unscripted, with Ferguson forgoing prepared questions to the point of literally tearing up his note cards before each interview. Some celebrity guests found this jarring. Others, like Kristen Bell and Mindy Kaling, began each appearance by gushing about how it made his their favorite show to visit.His largely ad-libbed monologue each night eschewed the easy one-liners favored by most hosts. Idiosyncratic, sometimes rambling, and almost effortlessly engaging, these monologues seemed as if they were occurring to him on the spot. The effect: he wasn’t talking at the audience, but with them. While so many late-night shows ushered viewers to sleep with nyuk-nyuk lullabies, his Late Late Show jolted you awake with Ferguson’s energy and drew you into conversation.


Contrary to reports, Ferguson’s exit from The Late Late Show had nothing to do with David Letterman announcing his retirement and Ferguson not being asked to be his successor.


“It used to enrage me when I was doing the show that people would assume I was trying to get the 11:30 p.m. show that came on before it,” he says. “Why the fuck would I want do that? To this day people don’t believe that I left because I didn’t get the show. It’s horseshit.”


When I point out that the reason so many people harp on that is because of a clause rumored to be in his contract that stipulated he would get a $5 million payout if he was passed over for Letterman’s gig, he politely cuts me off. “Yeah… that was never reported accurately.” Does he want to clear it up? “No, no, no. I don’t want to get into all that shit.”


He happily, however, assesses the nine months he’s spent without the Late Late Show’s regular employment. “At first it was a little strange,” he says. “But I was relieved to get out.”


Relieved? “I remember it very fondly,” he says, reiterating several times how glad he is to have done it and how proud he is of the work he did on it. “I don’t miss it though.” The thing is, as much as we enjoyed Ferguson’s take on the late-night format, it’s a format that he, perhaps unsurprisingly considering how often he renegaded it, never warmed to.


And now he doesn’t have to.


“It’s a little frightening in the way that change can sometimes be, but there’s relief,” he says of life now. “You see one of the major things that I got weary of in late-night was being part of a gang I didn’t want to be a part of. They’re all a great group of guys—nothing against them!—I just didn’t join that band. I felt… pigeonholed is too strong a word. But I felt that I wanted to do something different.”


Nearly one year after leaving ‘The Late Late Show,’ late-night’s goofy rebel discusses his new comedy special, the real reasons he left his show, and how it feels to be free.


Besides Just Being Honest, Ferguson has busied himself with a few guest-starring roles and a regular gig hosting the game show Celebrity Name Game, a job he cops to taking for, arguably, the right reasons: it’s easy, it’s fun, and it pays well. Season 2 premieres in syndication September 21, and he’s already shot over 250 episodes.


“There’s no reinventing the wheel here, but I have a good time doing it,” he says. “It’s not Tale of Two Cities, but it’s not meant to be.”


That’s not to say that the nostalgia and anxiety about aging that make for such prevalent talking points in Just Being Honest don’t stalk him while on the job, particularly when he remembers his wilder punk rock days and looks at the family-friendly game show host he’s become—or at least is playing for the time being.


“I would think, ‘Wait a fucking minute. What is this?’ I’ve got on a big, loud suit and I’m saying, ‘Oh, one more point for this team!’ And I’m like, what’s that about?” he says. “But the key to it is this: I don’t feel settled into anything. This is something I’m doing now. Will I do game shows forever? Absofuckinglutely not. Will I do it for a little while? Yeah. It’s easy and fun and I make a little money.”


No, “forever” is reserved for stand-up. “I’ll do it as long as they let me.”


Thinking back at his lengthy run in late-night, Ferguson can’t help but laugh. When he was considering taking the job in the first place, his friend Eddie Izzard advised him to do it but warned that if he did it for more than two years, people will think that’s all that he does: host. “So I said I’ll do it for two years, but then did it for 10.”


It’s almost confusing to hear Ferguson talk about how much he felt he didn’t fit in in late-night, given the accolades he received while doing it. The Peabody-winning interview with Desmond Tutu is iconic late-night television. How could he be a poor fit in a genre in which he was widely considered to be among the examples of excellence?


“Here’s the thing: I’m still doing it,” he says. “I’m just not doing it late-night.” Ferguson compares it to David Bowie and his alter ego. “I haven’t ceased to be me, or ceased to perform and do what I do,” he says. “What I did is… I guess I stopped dressing as Ziggy. It’s still me, but it’s not that me.”


He continues: “I used to be in a punk rock band saying, ‘You’ll never get me in a suit sitting behind a desk,’ and there you go—I did it for 10 years.”


He’s proud of those 10 years. He’s glad he did it. He’s glad it’s over, and, if he’s being honest, thinks we should all be glad, too.

********************

And Then There's This:

Craig Ferguson talks family, fame and face lifts – and how he went from comic drunk to comedy gold.... Craig Ferguson


I AM on my way to meet Craig Ferguson. “Isn’t he a comedian or something?” says a Scottish friend as I head for the door. “Aye, about as funny as a migraine.”


This friend vaguely remembers the Scottish Craig Ferguson who called himself Bing Hitler, swore a lot and almost died of alcohol abuse. The Craig Ferguson I’m meeting is a lean, fit, healthy telly and movie star from Tinseltown.


A case of mistaken identity? Nope. Same guy, different lives. This is a tale of two Ferguson's. The first left these shores frustrated and hampered by the negativity of people like my friend. Today, the second has returned home after conquering the land of opportunity – for the world premiere of his first big movie which is about a Scotsman who goes to Hollywood seeking his fortune.


Hollywood Craig hits you first. His “people” are all around, looking busy and speaking to other people on mobile phones. The beginning of the photo-shoot is interrupted when three American friends appear. “Great to see you,” he shouts, greeting them like family members who hadn’t seen each other for 40 years used to do on Cilla Black’s Surprise Surprise. He hugs the woman then turns to the two guys. Another round of warm embraces. Everyone seems absolutely thrilled, but you might wonder if it’s completely genuine.


Then Cumbernauld Craig becomes apparent. His hair is neatly coiffured, with light highlights on top, but those blue eyes dazzle over a peely wally, partially freckled complexion. Fashion has long dictated that black and blue don’t go, but Scottish Man – even one who has been in Hollywood for five years – has not been paying attention. Craig’s navy V-neck and blue jeans are supplemented by a black leather jacket and black leather shoes. He is wearing white socks. White socks.


The biggest showbiz snog is reserved for his wee sister, Lynn, a stand-up comedian who is also doing well. They haven’t seen each other for a while but are soon chatting like best mates. There is no awkwardness. “Don’t worry,” says Craig. “This is not an Eamon Andrews kind of moment.”


Lynn tries to explain. “My mother tells a story that when she was a kid she was told she would have four kids and two would be twins. There’s three years between us but just recently she said, I think you and Craig were twins. Something kind of weird happened … but you were twins.” The blood drains from Craig’s face. “You were hanging around in my mother’s womb for three years?”


The first subject they discuss is socks, but not Craig’s present selection. Instead, they are reminiscing over their earliest public performances when, at primary school in Cumbernauld, they put on puppet shows. “We were like annoying little Cumbernauld versions of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney,” explains Craig. “We put these shows on in the garage to our friends who we bullied into being in the audience.” He checks himself, slightly annoyed. He has been saying garage in the American way. “Anyway, we would make them watch shows of our devising. We used socks and buttons and we had a couple of rubber puppets. I’m sure we’re probably going to develop finger cancer in later life from using these things.”


They both laugh at the shared memories of a typical working class childhood. At 34 and 37 respectively, Lynn and Craig are the youngest of four children who’ve all grown successful in their own fields. The oldest, Janice, is a company executive who travels the world. Her siblings struggle to explain her job. “She’s a scientist,” says Craig. “An expert in sausage skins,” adds Lynn.


The next in line, Scott, is one of the high heid yins at Scottish Television, and Lynn, who is based in London these days, has come up to Edinburgh to present three Doin’ The Festival programmes for his channel. She also has a part in Honest, the film starring the All Saints’ girls which has been co-written and directed by Dave Stewart of Eurythmics fame, and she provided one of the voices for a big Hollywood animated film. She has also filmed a Channel 4 comedy, about a woman who falls in love with a fish. Having written the screenplay herself, she is now working on a six-part series for Radio Four.


One of the fixtures on the British stand-up circuit over the last decade, Lynn came to performing via drama school and a classical training. Craig, on the other hand, got into comedy to “get drunk and get women”.


“It was only after getting drunk and getting women that I kind of, despite myself, found that I really liked it, and actually I wasn’t bad at it.”


“Aye, at getting drunk and getting women,” says Lynn.


“Ah wasnae so great at getting the women but I was excellent at getting drunk.”


They make an entertaining double act. Lynn is confident, funny, in-your-face, a hundred miles an hour. In the presence of her brother, however, she sinks slightly into her shell. Maybe it’s because he is older, but today Craig is doing most of the talking. He cites his parents and their down-to-earth values as a big part of the reason that the children have done so well.


“It was not Little House on the Prairie,” he says, describing those formative years in Seventies Cumbernauld as like growing up in Braveheart had it been set in Detroit, starring Starsky and Hutch. “There was some pretty f**king nasty shit going about. I think that’s why the family is so close at the moment as well. My father worked in the Post Office for 45 years and he worked really hard. My mother went back to college when she was in her thirties.


There was a purpose to our childhood. It was intensely warm, it was earthy and it was unconventional. My mother had this thing about the television had to be off and we all had to talk. We had to have family discussions. It was kind of odd. The telly would be turned off and then we would be asked to discuss ‘Is Italy ready for communism?’ In the end I think it produced certainly three of my favorite adults in the world who are my two sisters and my brother.”


Lynn gives him a wee cuddle and says: “Aw, ya babe.”


I say to Craig that he’s part of a pretty successful family. “Yeah, in a nauseating, living-next-door-to-the-Bradys sort of way.”


But mum Netta and dad Bob aren’t too impressed by all the celebrity. “I just think of them as my weans,” Netta tells me. She phoned Lynn after the first Festival show was screened earlier this month.


“And,” says Lynn, “she said to me, I’m so proud Lynn, we were watching you on the telly last night and I said to your father, Robert, not one of mine have ever had to have their teeth fixed. That was it, nothing else.”


Craig jokes about living in LA, and having capped teeth and a face lift.


“You’ve not got capped teeth,” says Lynn, seriously.


“And I’ve not got a f**king face lift either,” adds Craig, incredulous that his wee sister missed the joke.


When Craig went to LA five years ago he was frustrated by attempts to get somewhere at home. He made his name as the loud mouth stand-up comic Bing Hitler, but shows on BBC Scotland like 2000 Not Out and The Ferguson Theory failed to live up to expectations. He thought he would try his luck in the entertainment capital of the world. Not long after he arrived he landed a role in a TV sitcom alongside Marie Osmond before getting his big break in The Drew Carey Show, a network comedy which is watched by 25 million Americans every week.


Now there is no stopping him. He has two movies in the can and has signed a seven figure deal to write two scripts for Paramount Pictures, including one he has just finished for Mick Jagger about a rock star and a roadie who swap places. Home is in the Hollywood hills where he lives with his American wife Sascha. He is living the American dream.


All of this is a million miles from the council estates of Cumbernauld but Craig, at the Edinburgh Film Festival for the world premiere of his first movie The Big Tease, keeps his feet on the floor. He is grateful that Hollywood is making the most of his talents.


“I didn’t go into this business knowing I wanted to do what I’m doing now,” he says. “I wouldn’t have dared dream to get where I am now. If someone had said to me when I was 16 that, by the time I was 37, I would be making motion pictures in Hollywood, I would have said they were out of their f**king minds. I never thought I would make it to 37. I would have said I’d be working in Burrough’s machines and I would be a drummer in a cabaret band at Cumbernauld United Social Club at the weekend.


“I always found there was a lack of confidence in Scotland. There wasn’t a lack of confidence in us. The best I could have dreamed of was a season at Ayr Gaiety. Now there’s nothing wrong with a season at Ayr Gaiety but nobody told me there was another option.


“You see, before Billy {Connolly} there was nothing. Billy was Elvis. And whatever people say about Billy in this country, well f**k ‘em all. Billy was Elvis. And before him there was nothing. Harry Lauder and all that. Forget that. That means nothing to me. Billy had a voice that sounded like us. He made albums and he talked on Parkinson and he was f**king hysterical. And he’s still f**king hysterical. And nowhere near enough credit is given to Billy for what he has done for this country. Especially in his own country. He’s Elvis and The Beatles. He changed everything. Everything changed with Billy.”


By the time he finishes speaking he is sitting on the very edge of his seat. Like Connolly he achieves maximum impact with regular use of the f-word. But now that he is a relatively near neighbor of his hero, are they ex-pat pals?


“I know him a wee bit. I don’t know him much. He was my hero as a kid and remains so. It’s awkward … and I’m awkward around him because I’m not good at meeting people I admired as a kid. I’m very awkward around Denis Law because, you know, it’s Denis Law.”


A waiter arrives with drinks. Both are having Diet Coke, but Lynn has also ordered a cafe latte because she is “a greedy pig”.


“Ho, how come you’ve got two drinks?” shouts Craig.


“Because I’m wee-er than you” The young waiter spots his chance: “She’s good-looking as well.”


Lynn’s face lights up in mock astonishment. “Oh, thank you so much for saying that. Y’know, I feel like one of those sad old women who wants to kiss you.”


“All right, all right, that’s enough,” says Craig.


“I’m waiting,” says the waiter.


“Ho, that’s ma sister yer talkin’ to there, pal. Go on, get out the room. The pair of youse.”


Every Sunday – without fail – the Ferguson children phone home. It’s a family tradition. If someone has a problem the others rally. Craig and Lynn have been particularly good at that with each other in the past.


“Our relationship evolves and changes,” he says. “If the two of us were to sit here and tell you we had never had a fight then I think you’d smell a rat and you’d be right. We are both very feisty personalities. We have strong ideas about a lot of things. Neither of us have ever been shrinking violets. When we fight it gets ugly. But it’s like weather. It will come and it will go. I think the true test, and I hope I can install this in my own children when the time comes, is that you can argue, and you can fight and you can disagree, because it will pass. We have had arguments about creative issues to do with work and we’ve disagreed on whether or not Italy was really ready for communism.”


So who does Craig Ferguson think he is? He has returned to his homeland as something of a stranger. The film he has written, produced and starred in is a Hollywood movie about a gay Scottish hairdresser, Crawford Mackenzie, who goes to the World Hairdressing Championships in LA. The star smiled for the cameras at the world premiere in Edinburgh, yet press coverage was minimal the following day because most Scots have forgotten who Craig Ferguson is. He is better known in America. And well done to him. That is a mighty achievement.


Despite this, he is still the same person who left Scotland. Those down-to-earth roots ensure he avoids the hypocrisy that comes as part of the Hollywood package.


“Life is too short,” says Lynn. “If you spend your whole life pretending, which is what me and Craig do, then why bother when you’re off duty? It’s a bit weird when he has all these people around him but I just think of Craig as my big brother. He’s magic. And I’m just really happy if he’s happy. When I saw this movie I just felt an enormous amount of pride. I just thought of this wee boy with the socks and buttons and the puppets doing this big movie, and it was great.”


The toughest test of their love came, perhaps, when Craig was destroying himself with alcohol at the start of the Nineties. Lynn’s reluctance to talk on the subject speaks volumes of the toll it took on her brother and the family.


“Sometimes people run with the ball,” she says. “But sometimes the ball is thrown at them and it moves them off in another direction they can’t handle. So everyone else has to drop the ball they are carrying and make sure that person doesn’t get thrown into something they don’t want to be in. That’s what I think about that period of time. It’s not very nice but it stays behind closed doors. Some things are not public property – ever.”


When we began talking, Craig noted jokingly that being asked about his childhood and family is like a form of therapy. Facing the inevitable question of his alcoholism, he is relaxed and talks openly. How it almost killed him. How it put his family and friends through hell. How they tried to help him but he became distant. Alcoholism is a severe illness, he says, which he finally brought under control on February 18, 1992. He hasn’t touched a drop since.


“I’ve been really honest about this but I had my last drink seven- and-a-half years ago. Actually, while I’ve been telling you this I’ve decided that this is the last time I’m going to talk about it.”


Today it is Lynn who is hungover. As they leave for photos, she asks Craig if her eyes are bleary.


“Don’t worry,” he says, producing a small tube of eye drops from his pocket. “I might not have had a drink since 1992, but I still carry all my accoutrements.”


He holds her eyelid open and takes aim. “Get some of that down ye, pal. A wee tequila slammer.”


It hits the mark.


“Ahm a runnin’?” asks Lynn, squinting. “No, you’re all right.”


For a split second there is silence. But only for a split second.