James Corden is no stranger to new challenges – his career has straddled comedy and drama, TV and film, and an award-winning stint on Broadway. But the closest he has come to a talkshow is presenting a Sky1 sporting panel game with Freddie Flintoff.
However, on Monday he will take his bow under the fiercest of spotlights in the ultra-competitive world of US network TV, succeeding another Brit, Craig Ferguson, as host of the Late Late Show on CBS.
Corden, speaking from a car on his way to CBS’s Los Angeles studios at 5am local time, readily admits it is a gamble but said it was too good an opportunity to turn down.
“I have never done anything like this before, it’s all a big leap,” he told the Guardian. “I did think long and hard about it. I was kind of reticent because I never saw that being my career.
“But the more I thought about it, the more I thought I would regret turning it down. It’s not like a play or a film; these opportunities don’t come round again.”
Corden, who sprang to fame on the Bafta-winning BBC comedy Gavin and Stacey and won a Tony for his performance in the play One Man, Two Guvnors, said “of course” he gets nervous. “I have never done anything like this before, it’s all a big leap,” he said.
“I just have to try and make the best show I can and hope people respond to it. I’m going into it with open eyes, that this might not be the case. You just have to jump and give it your best shot, and hope you land safely somewhere.”
Leaks from early test shows suggested some members of the audience struggled with Corden’s humour and accent. This would not be the first time it has been an issue for a Brit abroad, after Cheryl Fernandez-Versini’s short-lived stint on the US version of the X Factor.
But Corden, who has moved to LA with his wife and young family, says the show needs to be given time to bed in. “These shows are bred on familiarity. It’s going to take a really long time to get anybody to watch it,” he said.
“To judge it on a night or a month or six months, it’s the equivalent of trying a soufflé after it’s been in the oven for 10 minutes.”
Piers Morgan, the highest-profile Brit to land a US talkshow in recent years, was dropped by CNN after his ratings dwindled. Another homegrown talkshow host, John Oliver, fared rather better and now has his own show on HBO after nearly a decade on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Morgan has said his advice to Corden was to “have a very thick skin. No matter how good you are, there will be a section of the media there who will completely savage you. There’s no mercy on American television and a lot of American shows fail instantly. I don’t think he will.”
Industry executives say the biggest challenge for Corden will be hosting the show five nights a week. He will borrow the tactic used by Graham Norton in his BBC1 chat show, of all the guests sitting on the sofa together.
Graham Stuart, long-time business partner of Graham Norton and executive producer of his BBC1 show, said: “The challenge of going to America is it’s a very different country with very different sensibilities and attitudes. We partly share a language, but to work there you have to assimilate, you have to be one of them, but yet be a little bit different.”
Stuart, who took Norton’s show to the US a decade ago, added: “Americans are conservative people; that is a critical factor. They have to believe you and accept you and understand you.”
Corden said: “I’ve lived in New York and now Los Angeles and you can start to think that’s America, but it’s not. It’s how do I talk to the kid in Nebraska, the couple in Ohio, the grandparents in Michigan, how do I come to them to persuade them this is where they should spend the last hour of the day.”
Corden joins at a time of flux for US late night talkshows, a long-standing staple of American TV. Long-serving David Letterman will step down from the Late Show, the programme that precedes the Late Late Show on CBS, on 20 May, to be replaced by Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert in September.
He previously discussed a project with HBO and a sitcom with CBS, before he was offered the talkshow a few months after a meeting with CBS executives Leslie Moonves and Nina Tassler. A fan of Corden since he appeared in Alan Bennett’s the History Boys, Tassler has described him as a “cross between Fred Astaire and Jack Black. He just has an incredible range”.
Corden’s opening show will feature Tom Hanks and Mila Kunis on the sofa, with other A-list names such as Will Ferrell, Kerry Washington and David Beckham lined up to appear in his first week.
The biggest draw of the job, said Corden, was the opportunity to be “incredibly creative, every day, and for my family a great opportunity to live somewhere else while my children are young. I don’t know of many more creative things to do than think of an idea in the morning and put [it] on TV in the evening”.
But as he cheerfully conceded: “It’s a real experiment, this.”
