As often happens when an embattled celebrity appears on a late-night program, Kevin Hart got so much applause when he took the stage at Late Night on Wednesday that one might forget he’s been embroiled in a month-long semi-apology tour. Soon after the Oscars announced in December that Hart would host the show in 2019, some of the actor’s old, homophobic tweets resurfaced. Hart initially refused to apologize for his old jokes, but later gave in—after abdicating his position as Oscar emcee. In later interviews, he claimed that the entire ordeal was a conspiracy to destroy his life and career; he also proclaimed that he was finished talking about the controversy: “I’m done with it. It gets no more energy from me,” he said on Wednesday’s Good Morning America, just hours before coming to Late Show.
That, of course, was not entirely true; Hart did have to talk about the debacle again with Stephen Colbert. The Late Show host is no stranger to holding actors accountable for their missteps, and at the beginning of their interview, he tried to do the same for Hart—until he gave up after a few minutes of dodged questions.
“You’ve been in the news lately,” Colbert said coyly after Hart sat down. “What? Have I?” Hart replied. Neither of them detailed precisely why that was, perhaps because Hart’s comments have received wall-to-wall coverage. (The offending tweets included statements like, “Yo if my son comes home & try’s 2 play with my daughters doll house I’m going 2 break it over his head & say n my voice ‘stop that’s gay.’” Another described actor Damien Dante Wayans’s profile picture as “a gay billboard for AIDS.”) Colbert did, however, read back something Hart had said to Michael Strahan that morning on G.M.A.: “I’m over that. I’m over the moment.”
“Is there anything about the way you’ve handled this situation over the last month that you would go back and change if you had a time machine?” Colbert asked. Hart answered with a no—and when Colbert pointed out that he had initially refused to apologize before apparently changing his mind, Hart essentially reverted to what he’d told Strahan earlier.
“It’s an onion,” Hart said. “So no matter how many times you keep peeling it, it’s just endless. . . I’m done. I did it. I’m over it. There is no more that I can do. I’ve done it.” The audience applauded.
But Colbert was not done with his line of questioning. He noted that as someone who has been telling jokes in the public eye for more than a decade, “I’ve found that it’s not over until the audience is over it—not when I’m over it. So do you have a sense that the audience is over it?”
“Well, here’s the difference,” Hart replied. “You can continue to live to please others, or you can have a position where you know that you’ve literally done what you can to try to please. At that moment—when you know that you’ve given your all to try to please and it’s still not received—you have to make a decision to go, ‘I’m done trying to please.’”
And when Colbert countered that pleasing an audience is part of an entertainer’s job? “It depends on the level of entertainer that you are. My job is me putting myself out there 24/7,” Hart said. “I’m authentic. I’m honest. I give you all of me. There is no version of me that’s fake. The bonus of doing that is that when things like this happen, you’re supposed to understand and know that I’m so true to me, that there is no B.S.” Hart also argued, as he did on Ellen last week, that he had apologized for his old jokes even before the Oscars host ordeal erupted—though that claim seems dubious at best.
“At some point, you just have to be O.K. with you,” Hart concluded. “I’m O.K. with me and all decisions that I’ve made in my life. This is a decision to say, ‘I’m done. I’m over it. That’s it.”
At that, less than five minutes into the interview, Colbert appeared to take his cue from the audience—which applauded Hart’s response. He then relented, segueing to a conversation about what Hart would have done as Oscar host. At one point, Colbert asked his guest who should host the Oscars now—like, say, Stephen Colbert. And when Hart said the Late Show emcee would be a great Oscar host, Colbert didn’t miss a beat: “Nope. . . I’ve got too much to apologize for, man. You’ve got nothing on me.”
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This story was originally published by Vanity Fair
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