Over the past decade, David Letterman — who walked away from “Late Night” in 2015 — has had time to reflect on the ups and downs of his career.
In a recent interview, the 77-year-old former late night television host opened up about the challenges he faced while in show business and explained why he thinks the pressures of Hollywood made him become a worse person.
“In show business, I find that I have pretended to be someone I’m truly not,” Letterman told GQ. “In my life here in Indiana and at my home with my family, I am probably the person I actually am. And I regret that they don’t kind of cross at any point.”
When asked whether show business made him a worse person, Letterman was quick to answer.
DAVID LETTERMAN RETURNS TO ‘LATE SHOW’ FOR FIRST TIME AFTER REPORTED TENSIONS ABOUT HIS EXIT
“Yes. You’re exactly right,” he said. “And I don’t know, maybe it’s only because I went through show business. I got that out of my system eventually that I can concentrate on being a better person and probably couldn’t have reached this point if I had not gone through the exercise of trying to succeed at show business.
“I just feel like personally, I have greater humanity than I did when I was in show business. It was all single-minded and great pressure, real unimagined, and I felt like it’s all on me, and it’s all on me, and that it was all nonsense.”
Letterman, who recently launched Letterman TV FAST Channel on Samsung TV Plus, acknowledged that he was often portrayed as “miserable” during most of his interviews in the ‘80s and ’90s.
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“There’s a couple of things going on there,” he said. “I was drinking heavily in those days — that may have provided some fuel for misery. And I guess not achieving what I imagined to be, like — you take Johnny Carson, there’s never going to be anybody as good at that kind of show as Johnny. Nobody better. Maybe there are people now who are excellent broadcasters and as good as Johnny, but nobody better. So here I am thinking: ‘Oh crap, I am not going to be as good as Johnny. What am I doing here?’”
Letterman walked away from “Late Night” in 2015 after hosting the show for 22 years.
“For the last handful of years, my favorite part of the show was just talking to people,” Letterman said of his experience towards the end of his run. “Because doing comedy each and every night, each and every night, each and every night, that’s meaningful and not just laughable, that’s tough. That’s really tough. And I was always lucky to have men and women who were really smart and really good writers. I just — I’d be in the next room. But the thing that I enjoyed mostly was actually just talking to people.”
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But along the way, the Indiana native faced plenty of uphill battles.
“I felt like whenever I would go out, there would be an expectation to which I could not live up,” he admitted. “‘Oh, here he comes. He’s going to do a show. He is going to be funny. We’re going to be entertained.’ And I kind of felt like that expectation takes quite a lot of energy, so I didn’t want to bleed it off before or after the actual show, which was always in desperate need of entertainment.”
These days, Letterman says he’s a much happier person living in his home state of Indiana.
“All I cared about was television, one hour of television that I was responsible for, for 30 years,” he said. “That’s all I cared about. Everything fell apart, went away. I didn’t even know if it was falling apart or not. And now I have the energy and the broader focus to recognize humanity has other fulfilling pursuits.”
While it’s been nearly a decade since he retired from Late Night, the TV host said he’s not sure he’ll ever fully retire.
“Retirement is a myth. Retirement is nonsense,” said Letterman, who still hosts a talk show, Netflix’s “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.”
“You won’t retire. The human mechanism will not allow you to retire.”
“As long as you are healthy, you still want to produce,” he added. “And you will find ways to — once I stopped doing the show, it took me a couple of years to figure out that, oh, this is a completely different rhythm. And without the rhythm that you’re accustomed to, largely unsatisfying. So, you got to find something that’s important to you.”
