A few notable celebrities have successfully and easily crossed the bridge between acting and hosting a chat show. Whoopi Goldberg won an Oscar long before she became one of the hosts of The View. But that part of her story is not exactly breaking news whenever anyone learns about it.
That’s not really the same situation for these five chat show hosts who’ve been hiding entire acting résumés in plain sight for decades. Every single one of them has demonstrated the kind of acting range they don’t really get credit for. One of them even won a Tony for his performance. Another spent decades playing exaggerated versions of himself so convincingly that most people assumed it was just him being funny.
5. James Corden
James Corden has a Tony Award sitting on a shelf somewhere, and it’s not for hosting anything. He bagged it back in 2012 for One Man, Two Guvnors. That was years before Carpool Karaoke turned him into the guy who drives celebrities around as they sing. The comedy was so physically demanding that critics repeatedly praised his stamina. That wasn’t a one-off award-season fluke, either.
Corden also co-created and starred in Gavin & Stacey, the British sitcom that made him a household name in the UK long before American audiences knew his name. He played the lovably crude Smithy for years, then came back for a 2019 Christmas special, and the 2024 series finale gave him a working actor’s résumé most late-night hosts never come close to building.
4. Conan O’Brien
Somewhere in season 7 of How I Met Your Mother, a tall redhead orders a beer at MacLaren’s and just stands there. Blink, and he’s gone, but that’s Conan O’Brien, and he won the cameo at a charity auction. The show’s writers wanted to build him an actual role, but O’Brien declined. He insisted it would be funnier for him to just blend into the background like any other extra.
That instinct for playing exaggerated, self-aware versions of himself shows up constantly. He’s voiced himself on The Simpsons, played himself as Larry David‘s impossible-to-approach celebrity neighbour on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and turned up as one of several real-world tech-world cameos alongside Bill Gates in Silicon Valley’s series finale. While he is playing himself in these roles, he has a natural ability that shows if he wanted to give acting a real go, he would have some serious chops.
3. Jimmy Fallon
Long before Jimmy Fallon became a The Tonight Show fixture, he was chasing feature film roles alongside his comedy career. Many forget that he actually landed a few. This includes a lead role opposite Drew Barrymore in the baseball rom-com Fever Pitch. He also starred alongside Queen Latifah in the action comedy Taxi. Both films are relatively well-known, solid studio gigs for the former Saturday Night Live cast member.
The one people forget entirely is smaller and stranger: a credited role in Band of Brothers, the acclaimed Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg HBO miniseries. Fallon plays 2nd Lieutenant George Rice in the episode “Crossroads,” delivering ammo by Jeep to Damian Lewis’s Major Winters in a scene Hanks himself directed. He’s since admitted he barely knew how to drive the thing, so the crew ended up pushing the Jeep into frame while he delivered his line.
2. Jon Stewart
By the time Jon Stewart took over The Daily Show in 1999, he’d already spent most of the decade balancing stand-up comedy with an active, if erratic film career. The deal he had with Miramax kept him busy throughout the 1990s. He portrayed the charming Henry in the 1997 rom-com Wishful Thinking, alongside Drew Barrymore and Jennifer Beals.
He also popped up in big studio hits like The Faculty and Adam Sandler’s Big Daddy. He played a menacing science teacher possessed by aliens in the former, and then Sonny’s absentee roommate, and the real father of the kid he ends up raising in the latter. Neither role pointed to a future in political satire, but that’s exactly where it led Stewart.
1. Craig Ferguson
Craig Ferguson’s résumé from before he ever sat behind a CBS desk is almost impossible to believe: punk-band drummer, Scottish stand-up comic, screenwriter, and director, with real festival credits to show for it. He also co-wrote, executive produced, and starred (as Crawford Mackenzie) in The Big Tease, a 1999 mockumentary about a Scottish hairdresser chasing a world championship title.
The following year, he co-starred as the gardener who talked a widow into growing and selling marijuana to save her house in the beloved British comedy Saving Grace. By the time he took over The Late Late Show in 2005, acting and writing weren’t new skills he’d picked up. They were the whole foundation.
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