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Conan O’Brien Continues To Be Our Best International Ambassador

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When I was an NBC intern 10 years ago, my peers and pages working out of 30 Rockefeller Plaza spoke with reverence about their interactions with Conan O’Brien, who then hosted Late Night with Conan O’Brien on the sixth floor. Multiple times, I heard O’Brien encounters described as life-affirming pep talks—apparently, he had a way of making each person feel valued and invigorated about the future, even if his or her professional prospects involved years of errand-running and grunt work (O’Brien’s said that his own 22-year career at the network began when he was “a completely unknown writer with no television-writing experience and bad skin”). O’Brien left NBC in January 2010, when he was replaced as The Tonight Show‘s host by his predecessor, Jay Leno, after just 146 episodes. During his final Tonight Show episode, however, O’Brien was inspiring instead of acrimonious. “Despite this sense of loss, I really feel that this should be a happy moment,” he said. “Every comedian—every comedian—dreams of hosting The Tonight Show, and for seven months I got to do it!”

I finally met O’Brien in May 2015 while reporting from a luncheon that followed Turner’s 2015 Upfront Presentation (O’Brien has been hosting Conan on TBS since November 2010; in his first monologue there, he joked, “People ask me why I named the show Conan. I did it so I’d be harder to replace”). Contradicting every celebrity meeting I’d had before or since, he approached me; we were downstairs at Tao, an Asian-fusion restaurant in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood that serves $13 Giant Fortune Cookies for dessert. Though we talked for less than four minutes, O’Brien is easily the best star I’ve ever interviewed—that’s how “on” he was. His answers were so funny and detailed and visual that our exchange resulted in two illustrated Esquire stories (one about David Letterman‘s imminent late-night departure, the other about O’Brien’s predictions for the year 2040). I never did delete the recording.

Tonight, TBS will air an hour-long special called Conan Without Borders: Made In Mexico. O’Brien announced his intent to rent a studio in Mexico City and tape an episode with an all-Mexican staff, crew, guest list and audience back in late January, the day Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto cancelled a meeting with Donald Trump, who vows to build a wall along the nearly-2,000 mile long border between our nations. “With all of this week’s negative news about the relationship between the United States and Mexico…I thought I’d try and do something positive,” he said on Conan. America’s longest-serving late-night host, O’Brien has distinguished himself by filing more field pieces than his peers, particularly from areas of the world that have experienced tension with the U.S. His guests this time will include former Mexican president Vicente Fox and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story‘s Diego Luna, and he’ll also make time guest star on the telenovela Mi Adorable Maldición and scour the streets soliciting donations for the border wall.

A six-foot-four, fair-skinned redhead with an unconventional name—responsible for a Harvard thesis on William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor plus the Masturbating Bear—O’Brien’s charming awkwardness translates well in far-flung locales. “Our biggest or most engaging hits are when Conan travels or goes out into the world,” Steve Beslow, general manager of Conan‘s Team Coco Digital, told my Decider colleague Lea Palmieri in January. “We’ve seen a lot of international people literally responding to everything he does with, ‘Please come visit me in my country.'” In honor of Conan Without Borders, let’s revisit some of O’Brien’s previous dispatches from around the globe.

Conan Without Borders: Made In Mexico airs tonight at 10 ET/9 CT on TBS.

1

Ireland, 1999

In County Limerick, O’Brien struggled to decipher accents and searched for his kin, showing locals doctored black and white photos of his “ancestors” and asking, “Maybe you know somebody that is related to me? The last name is O’Brien.” He took breaks from traversing emerald hillsides in a tweed cap to serenade  old ladies drinking Guinness, and teach Irish school children about “famous Irish-Americans” like Shaquille O’Neal.

 

2

Finland, 2006

Prior to visiting Helsinki, O’Brien and his staff produced campaign ads in Finnish supporting the re-election of then-president/O’Brien doppelgänger Tarja Halonen. After landing at the snow-strewn airport, he gave a nonsense press conference and signed many autographs. Donning a fur hat, O’Brien attempted to generate big reactions from the reserved residents, danced a jig for some unimpressed Chinese tourists, joked about suicidal polar bears, and watched a group of men skinny-dip in the Baltic Sea.

3

Cuba, 2015

After President Obama lessened trade restrictions with Cuba, O’Brien put on a straw fedora and became the first American late-night host to film there in more than 55 years. In Havana, he fist-bumped carriage drivers, rolled his Rs in a Spanish class, toured a cigar factory, danced salsa, and jaywalked across a very busy highway.

4

Armenia, 2015

O’Brien took his longtime assistant, Sona, to her family’s homeland, where she proved a skilled translator. While in Armenia’s capital city, Yerevan, O’Brien shoplifted dried fruits from a marketplace, drove up the price of street art, played a gangster on an Armenian soap opera, danced on a mountaintop in a traditional costume, appraised rugs and smoked hookah.

5

South Korea, 2016

Alongside his “cultural ambassador”—The Walking Dead‘s Steven Yeun—O’Brien tried his luck at Korean arcade games, ate Korean pancakes, and visited a Buddhist temple. The Far East journey also included another soap opera role, a tae kwon do class, and squeezing “fake penis” marine worms at a fish market.

6

Berlin, 2016

During his trip to Berlin, O’Brien paid his respects at the Berlin Wall, raced down the Autobahn, mixed ground beef at a sausage factory, and shared kisses with a male flea market vendor.