AVC: Any that stand out in your mind?
SC: No. That's all kind of a blur. I was just trying to keep my head above water and get what I could get. And my wife and I had moved to the West Coast, and that was our first experience there, so there was some acclimating we needed to do, and just sort of understanding how Los Angeles works and how to go about getting an agent. It was a very different world. And along the way, Stephen Colbert got a job on The Daily Show, and when they started looking for new correspondents, he threw my name in, and that's how that came about.
AVC: Jon Stewart had already taken over as the host?
SC: Yes. He started about six months before I started, before I did my first piece there.
AVC: So you didn't have to deal with the shift from Craig Kilborn to Stewart?
SC: I never met Craig Kilborn.
AVC: Before Jon Stewart, I enjoyed watching The Daily Show, but I always felt a little guilty, you know?
SC: There's an element of... You know, you're doing a field piece, and you're clearly mocking someone who's just going about their life and not hurting anyone, they're just a little off-center. And there's a certain self-satisfied quality to it that's not right. It's as if we're the smart ones, and we're so much smarter and better than the people we're interviewing, and I didn't like that. I didn't think that was true. It was too easy. I saw a better way to go about having fun in the field pieces. The ones that I always enjoyed the most were the ones that made fun of the news magazines and newspeople, like making fun of the whole idea of a field piece as opposed to the subject. They were just sort of innocent bystanders instead of victims.
AVC: Kind of a goof on the medium itself.
SC: That to me was more interesting and intelligent, and certainly less offensive.
AVC: Did you get that response a lot, where you'd do a field piece and then the subject would be angry about how they were perceived?
SC: That would happen from time to time, and I think as the show grew and as Jon kind of asserted himself more, that changed. Because our idea wasn't so much to go out and find kooky people to make fun of. He wanted the field pieces to have more meaning, to have more of an arc as opposed to, "Well, we're just going to find an odd person who believes in aliens and make fun of them."
AVC: So more of a satirical angle.
SC: That's what he was hoping to do. Plus, the way I sort of protected myself from the pieces getting too hostile was, I assumed the character of a complete idiot. And I would try and ask the most idiotic questions with a straight face and elicit a response from the people I was interviewing. To me, that was how I kind of guarded against mocking them. It became more of a self-mocking thing, and it became easier that way. The pieces still turned out to be funny, but they... It wasn't at their expense. It was more at my own.
AVC: That oblivious persona probably didn't hurt when you were getting roles in Bruce Almighty and Anchorman.
SC: I know the casting director at Universal was a fan of The Daily Show, and that's how I got my audition for Bruce Almighty.
AVC: The Internet Movie Database says you went to the film thinking you'd be cut out entirely.
SC: Well, I didn't know whether I'd be in it or not. I certainly prepared my parents and family for the fact that I might not be in it. I didn't want to oversell it, because I've seen so many of my friends telling everybody they know, "I'm in this commercial," or "I'm on this TV show," and then they're either cut out completely, or cut down to virtually nothing. So I tried to very much downplay my involvement in it, because I only shot for a few days, and I figured, "This could be an easily cuttable part of the movie." So I had no idea when I went to the première whether I was in it at all, or just a little bit.
AVC: It seems like that helped your career a lot, having that flashy role in such a huge hit.
SC: I kinda lucked out. They let it play out as a fairly big scene in the movie, so I just kind of got lucky there.
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