Jimmy Fallon: How I became a late night talk show host

Susannah Hutcheson | Special for USA TODAY

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Our series “How I became a …” digs into the stories of accomplished and influential people, finding out how they got to where they are in their careers.

Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Late night talk show host Jimmy Fallon has been dominating the small screen for years. On his show, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, you’ll see Fallon doing everything from making “Slow Jam News” with President Obama and sharing the stage with artists such as Bruce Springsteen to having lip sync battles with Paul Rudd and parodying celebrities and iconic pop culture moments.

USA TODAY caught up with the impressionist, comedian, host and dad to talk about everything from oat milk and writing music with Paul McCartney to his relationship with Lorne Michaels to his beginnings on Saturday Night Live.

Question: What’s your coffee order?

Answer: Right now it’s an oat milk latte. Oat milk is the new almond milk, are you kidding me? (Which was the new soy milk, which was the new milk … just so you know). It’s the new way, and it’s very, very trendy. After this phone call, I’ll be doing rock milk and pebbles.

Q: What’s the coolest thing that you have ever done?

A: I sang the original Yesterday with Paul McCartney. When he wrote that song originally, in his head it was “scrambled eggs.” So when he wrote down “scrambled eggs, oh, my baby, how I love your legs.” When he woke up the next day he started playing with that, so I said, what if we finish the song and write it like the original, where it’s all about food and scrambled eggs? So, we wrote it out and I pitched it to him, and I was so nervous. I was like, “I can’t believe I’m pitching him this.”

I’ll sing it — “scrambled eggs, oh my lady how I love your legs — but not as much as I love scrambled eggs — oh, have you tried scrambled eggs?” The next lyric was “oh, waffle fries …” And as I was singing “waffle fries,” his head was over my shoulders, singing with me. I go, “oh my God, I can’t believe I’m doing this. This is him.”

And he said, “yeah, I’ll do it. As long as you do it with me.” And that’s just kind of when everything went numb. He brought the original acoustic guitar that he wrote Yesterday on, and we both sang a duet and sang “Scrambled Eggs.” I just kept saying in my head, “don’t screw it up! Don’t screw this up!”

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Q: Who has been your biggest mentor?

A: Lorne Michaels, who is a producer of the Tonight Show as well as 70% of every show on television and, right now, Broadway. He was my first producer, my first boss with Saturday Night Live, and we stayed friends ever since.

I was 23 when I got Saturday Night Live and I’m 43 now, so we’ve been friends for 20 years. He’s the guy I go for all advice, not just career-wise, but life-wise. If I’m renting a car, I’ll call him and go, “What car should I rent?” And he’ll go, “A Lexus is always nice, quiet … it’s kind of unassuming, but still luxurious.” (He laughs)

I honestly recommend, if you run into him, ask him any question. He just gives really great advice.

Q: What does a typical day look like for you?

A: I have two daughters, a 3-year-old and a 4-year old, and they go to preschool. Because they’re 3 and 4, that’s when I wake up — at 3 or 4 a.m. It’s insane. I get up with them, with my wife, and we limp over to make coffee and kinda try to get our heads in the game and then get them ready for school and walk them over to school.

If I can, I like to try to walk to work. I put on a Fitbit and see if I can get up to 10,000 steps — which I really can’t do. If you think a talk show host who sits behind a desk all day gets 10,000 steps, you would be wrong. Turns out, you’re just sitting behind a desk all day. It’s a lot of sitting. If I had a Sitbit, I would hit 10,000. I would hit 20,000. I’m up to almost 6,000 steps, which is pretty good today. It’s about to go downhill, because now it’s the part of the day where it’s all meetings and meetings and then sitting for the show. Professionally. With makeup on. And my hair done.

I usually get in around 10 in the morning, and what I do differs. I can think of some ideas or things I have to catch up on, or if I’m speaking on something, or if I had some ideas on my phone from the night before I try to get those written out so I know how to talk to the writers about it today.

Then, if I can, I like to sit back and meditate for 15 minutes using Headspace or some smartphone app. Again, whatever the new trendy app is — I mean, I’m doing oat meditation, which I know you want to get in to. It’s ahead of its time.

I’m trying to teach myself the piano, so I have a program on my computer called Playground and a tiny little keyboard that fits on my desk. I plug it in to my computer and I’m slowly, baby steps, taking these lessons that come with the program, and it’s really fun.

So I do that for maybe 20 minutes, and then if I have an idea I run up to social media and I go, “Whoa, what’s this thing? How about that?” And then they go get me a recap of what happened the day before, and “dude, the Ariana Grande video is blowing up,” and then, “well cool — let’s do this, what can we do with that?”

NBC, Andrew Lipovsky/NBC

And then I walk down the hall and see a bunch of different people from different departments, and it’s a pretty creative place. Someone’s always got a different idea or something they want to show me, and then, probably around noon, that’s where all of the meetings really start.

I have to do a meeting with the producers, just so we know what’s happening two months from now so we can plan it all out, and it’s pretty boring from here on out to write about for you, but sorry, it’s your job (he laughs). I sit with the producers, then I have a producers and head writer meeting, then I have a segment producer meeting to tell me what guests are coming on and what they want to talk about and what different things that we want to talk about.

That works its way up to about maybe 3 p.m. and then maybe I might want to play one (smartphone) game of Clash Royale, and then I go down to rehearsal down the hall which is pretty fun. I see what we’re doing, if we’re playing a game or if we have live animals … you never know what you’re going to get when you walk down the hallway.

I rehearse, and then we have a crowd command that comes in, and I go over my monologues that I’m going to read that night. On Mondays, we’ve been Instagram and Facebook livestreaming (the rehearsals), if you guys ever want to see us do that.

When that’s done, I select jokes from our writers, ranging from everything from politics to pop culture to silly stories, and I get hair and makeup, get ready for the show, read over my monologue cue cards. Usually Lorne will come down, and we’ll hang out in the green card room and go over jokes.

Then I go out, I say hello to our guests, and I welcome them to the show. I go backstage, get mic’d up, hear The Roots and I hear the crowd. I stay behind the curtain and I see the spotlight come on, I walk out, and we begin the show.

USA TODAY Opinion_Eileen Rivers

Q: What does your career path look like, from the early days until now?

A: My first big break for me was that my mom had heard about an impression contest on the radio, and they were looking for the funniest person in the Hudson Valley. I was in upstate New York — in Saugerties. It was at Bananas Comedy Club in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and it was two or three minutes of an impression. My mom said, “Jimmy, you should do this, because you do all of these voices in your bedroom, and I can hear you!” And I’m like … “What else can you hear? Because this is creepy.”

Someone had given me a Troll doll for my graduation (I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it, but it had a graduation cap and a diploma. Maybe you put it on your dresser or something?). So I took this Troll doll and did these different celebrities auditioning to be the spokesperson for this doll. So I would do John Travolta (Fallon switches into a thick Jersey accent) — “like, look at his hair! I can’t believe this thing. Look how crazy his hair is! He doesn’t even have any pants on, what kind of doll is this? He’s like a naked doll!”

I would do Seinfeld, and I did like 12 impressions in two minutes and I won the contest. I won a lot of money — I want to say, like, $500. So for two minutes of work — and I had been working since I was 13 — that was so much money. I freaked out and said, “This is my future! This is it!” The cold hard truth was, no. You don’t make $500 every two minutes. I started entering talent shows, and my dad would drive me around to different gigs. I got booked at Bananas, I was the emcee, and I worked Friday, Saturday and Sundays on top of my other job working at a beverage center. On weekends I would do stand-up, adding more voices and then eventually adding music.

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I went to college (the College of St. Rose in Albany, N.Y.), put on my own comedy shows at St. Joseph’s Hall, and then my senior year I sent my videotape out to see if anyone was possibly looking for a comedian. A guy that I used to work for — Peter Iselin — I had given him my tape and my headshots because he had said he was going out to L.A., and asked him to let me know if he saw any room for comedians. I get a call ... from him, saying that they had a comedy division and the manager liked what she saw — “she thinks you’re really funny. You’re green, but she’d love to work with you. Would you consider moving to L.A.?”

I was a senior at this point, 15 credits shy of graduating, and I told my parents that I thought I was going to drop out and move to Los Angeles. They agreed, we all pooled as much money as we could — the $500 from Bananas had dried out at that point — and I moved to Los Angeles and lived on my friend’s couch for three or four months before I could get my own place.

I did improv, I took classes at The Groundlings, I was very lucky out there. I got to do a lot of cool things. Long story long, I sent my tape to Saturday Night Live for an audition, and they said they’ll take a look at it in New York. So I went to the Comic Strip in New York City, and I did my Troll doll act, and I totally bombed it and it was terrible. I couldn’t get the crowd going, they didn’t quite know what I was talking about, and I rushed into it. I was so nervous. Saturday Night Live said, “Don’t worry about it,” I’m not getting the job, and turns out they hired Tracy Morgan.

I was so depressed and went back to L.A., went back to classes at The Groundlings, went back to The Improv. And then the next year I got another call from Saturday Night Live saying they wanted to see me again, but they didn’t want to see the Troll Doll bit — “We’ve already seen that. Can we think of a new thing?” I wrote a whole new act, came back to New York and auditioned on the stage of Saturday Night Live, and I took pictures of everything that I could with a throwaway camera that I got at a drugstore. I thought I might never step foot on NBC (property) again.

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I had a great audition. A lot of people kept telling me, “Don’t worry about it, Lorne won’t laugh.”

“He doesn’t laugh.”

“Don’t expect him to laugh!”

“Lorne won’t laugh.”

“Hey, good luck to you, what’s your name? Just to let you know, Lorne won’t laugh.”

I heard it from like 10 different people, and I did an impression of Adam Sandler. At the time he had just left the show, and no one had done an impression of Adam. And I made Lorne laugh — he put his head in his hands, and he laughed, and I thought, "Wow!"

I remember just floating out of there, and it took me a while for them to call me. They had me meet Lorne in L.A., and he told me I got the job, so I moved back to New York for my dream job. I did Saturday Night Live, I had a great run there (seven seasons), and I was leaving — I wanted to leave while I was still on good terms with everybody, and I loved the show, and I have no bad stories about Saturday Night Live — and as I was leaving was asked if I ever wanted to become a talk show host, because Conan O’Brien was leaving in, like, six years.

Six years later, my movie career didn’t pan out, and I got a call from Lorne and asked me if I wanted to do it. I needed to call my wife, and she said, “You have to! You have to try this!”

So, I said I’ll do it. NBC waffled for a little bit, they’re like, “Is Jimmy Fallon the guy we want?” And Lorne stuck up for me. He said, “If you don’t do it with Jimmy, I won’t produce.”

And that’s how I became a talk show host.

We lived through some crazy times, and it never really ended. Once we began, this is when Conan O’Brien was there with The Tonight Show and Jay Leno, and then Jay leaving and then Jay coming back, and then it was David Letterman and Jon Stewart, and, I mean, these were heavy hitters when we started. Dave Letterman was the king of New York and Jon Stewart, and they’re all gone now. It’s so interesting. It’s a whole new landscape, but we’ve done a lot of cool things.

Eileen Rivers, USA TODAY

Q: What advice would you give someone who wants to follow in your footsteps?

A: Don’t do it for money. You’ll never make money. Do it because you like it and you like what you’re doing.

And then, the secret is, you may end up making money. But don’t go into it thinking that you’re doing this for money, because I never thought about money. Never, ever.