John Oliver Says Appearing Alongside George Clooney Is An ‘Unforgiving Comparison’

Although John Oliver was absent from HBO last night, that hasn’t stopped the “Last Week Tonight” host from reflecting on his previous seasons of success.

The Emmy-award-winning host recently sat down with IndieWire to talk about some of the highlights from the past season, including George Clooney’s hilarious cameo appearances.

For a while, John Oliver had a running gag where he would snap his fingers and George Clooney would magically appear during the season. When asked about how that came about, Oliver admitted that “it wasn’t a planned idea.”

“All we knew was that we had this story about sponsored content that we wanted to do, and there was this clip in there where this woman is showing that she can produce local news anchors [with a snap of her fingers.] Just conceptually, it felt like a fun joke to say, ‘Look who I can produce,’” he explained.

“We thought that George Clooney might do it, partly because his dad was a local newsman, so we knew this story was really personally important to him. And that worked out,” he shared. “He was very, very passionate about that story. So he did it and then also agreed to appear in other stories in these five-second bits — which, like you say, were immensely helpful for us, especially when I’m in an austere, white void environment talking about a technical story.”

“We did try and ration those Clooney bits to points where we really needed him; where it felt like, ‘You know what? You’ve made it 16 minutes into this story. Here’s George for you,’” he joked.

“He [recorded] a bunch for us after that first one so that we knew what we had and we could use them whenever we wanted,” he continued. “[That made it] much easier for us to use them when we could maximize their efficacy in a story that really felt like it needed a splash of glamor. But it’s a brutal juxtaposition. When you find your face suddenly paired with George Clooney, oh man, it is an unforgiving comparison.”

“But even that grumpiness, it kind of frames his face beautifully,” he added. “Whereas a smile on this [gestures to his face], it’s not really helping anything.”

John Oliver is not only grateful that the show had been running for nine seasons now. He’s also grateful that HBO is willing to put their main segments – which are often 20 to 30 minutes long – on YouTube, for free, to reach more people.

“I guess the most reductive thing is when we started, no one really knew who we were. It felt like we were going to need to reach beyond our audience on a Sunday night because that audience might not exist,” he began.

“What then became clear very, very quickly is that there was huge value into putting that main story — not the whole show, but that main story — up on YouTube so that it could exist in a much broader world than just HBO subscribers, and could contribute to some kind of conversation because of that added reach,” he added.

“We’ve been very, very fortunate to be able to do that, and I don’t take it for granted,” he continued. “I’m very grateful that it’s been able to continue. It’s meaningful to us to be able to talk to people that might not otherwise be able to, or necessarily want to, hear what we have to say.”

“It’s a huge privilege that so far, across eight years, it does seem like people are willing to sit through stories for 25 minutes that do not seem that entertaining when you start talking about them,” he continued. “I am cognizant of how lucky we are to be able to talk about PACE loans on TV and have people watch it, or the complexities around ransomware, or how EMTs are funded.”

“I know that this is not, on its surface, palatable entertainment,” he added. “And we really do try to make it more palatable, but we are very lucky to have an audience that trusts us to deal with stories that we believe are interesting, even if they may not seem so, superficially.”

Fans can check out John Oliver's most recent segment on Ticketmaster below.