“Not to brag,” says Seth Meyers, “but I was at the Met Ball last year. I was in a tuxedo, and my wife looked lovely. We left, and basically that was when I got the text that the strike had started. It was a real riches-to-rags night.”

He’s referring, of course, to the Writers Guild strike that began last May and derailed Hollywood for a large portion in 2023, especially after the Screen Actors Guild embarked on its own concurrent strike. Nightly programs like Late Night With Seth Meyers were some of the first productions to go dark, leaving Meyers and his cohort in an especially tough spot.

At first, hosts like Meyers and his network-mate Jimmy Fallon pledged to help pay their staffers themselves. As the strike wore on, those two joined with three of their ostensible rivals—Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver—for a limited-run podcast called Strike Force Five, the proceeds of which went to staffers affected by the work stoppage.

Though the program was rough at the beginning—“I was like, it’s a football team with five quarterbacks. And nobody can catch, run, or block,” says Meyers—it gradually found its groove, particularly once each host figured out which role on the team fit him best. Meyers breaks it down like this: “Stephen is the cool dean, you know what I mean? He’s the college dean who shows up, comes out to the drum circle, maybe. Jimmy [Fallon] is the lovable goofball. John is exactly what he is in real life: He’s the foreign exchange student who’s trying not to draw too much attention to himself, but every time he talks, it’s an absolute banger of a joke. Kimmel is like the fraternity guy at school who subverts everybody’s expectations of what a fraternity guy is. He’s the most welcoming.”

As for Meyers himself? “I guess I’m the guy who’s like, should we drink? It’s one in the afternoon. Should we start drinking?”

The answer, for anyone who’s watched one of Meyers’s incredibly entertaining “Seth Goes Day Drinking” segments, is yes—particularly now, when his version of Late Night is taking its 10-year victory lap. Read or listen on to see Meyers dig into what he learned from his fellow late-night hosts, celebrating Late Night’s anniversary with Amy Poehler and Joe Biden, getting through another Emmy season, and dealing with the specter of a second Donald Trump presidency.

Vanity Fair: Obviously nobody ever wants to go on strike, but it does seem like that period was creatively fruitful for you.

Certainly, born out of desperation There was a real effort made by myself and our fellow hosts. We were trying to take care of our staff. So that was how Strike Force Five began.

Stephen Colbert was the one who got us all together, just to talk about how the strike would affect our shows. And then Kimmel put together the idea of a podcast. That was really lovely—not just creatively to be able to chat with those guys, but I have such a better relationship with all of them than I had before the strike. That was one of the few silver linings.

When you appeared on Kimmel recently, you said that people want the late night guys to hate each other—and that they’re kind of disappointed that you’re friends.

Look, I am not happy that there was so much strife back in the day. But I certainly devoured the Bill Carter books about the late night wars. So it’s a little bit like—would the Housewives be a franchise if it was all housewives who got along? I don’t know if it would. With that said, having lived through it, it’s certainly preferred to be on good terms with everybody and sort of be rooting for one another.

This year, your version of Late Night celebrated its 10th anniversary. In the leadup to that, did you go back and revisit some of your early shows? And was that uncomfortable?

It’s very uncomfortable. If I go back and look at an SNL from early 2014, where I’m at the Weekend Update desk, that looks like a thing I remember having done. When I go back and look at the first year of my show, where I’m standing and we have a weird set that somebody said looked like the movie Stargate… Alec Baldwin famously told Lorne [Michaels] it looked like a sushi restaurant in Burbank. I think that that was maybe the final blow, where Lorne decided he would help get us a new set. Just suits, and weird hands, and tiny chairs, and a weird desk—that feels like a fever dream.

And also, it was probably the most scared and uncomfortable I was. I felt scared and uncomfortable my first year at SNL, but I just wasn’t on camera that much. So yes, the short answer is I did not go back and look at many early shows, because it’s just not something I like doing. It’s like how people don’t have giant framed photos of themselves from when they were 13.

You wound up giving yourself this amazing opportunity 10 years later to revisit one of your first guests on that show: Joe Biden. How hard was it to get him back on Late Night? He doesn’t do very many TV interviews.

He doesn’t do many things. I mean, we had an ace in the hole.

Amy Poehler, right? Who was also on your very first show.

When he was vice president, he very famously agreed to go second on our first show to Amy Poehler, who he was a fan of.

Because her character on Parks and Rec is in love with him.

Right. She’d done a lot of the groundwork to make that venture thrive.

So we sort of went and explained, here’s how we think it would lay out. Amy would be back, and the president would come out and chat a little with both of us, and that would be a little bit lighter. Then we would go on to do a second segment with just the two of us, where you get into more substantive issues.

As shows go, we don’t do a lot of self-celebratory stuff. One of the reasons is that our show clips terribly. The only thing we have that clips well is Day Drinking, and I feel like if we showed a bunch of those in a row, people would have an intervention for me. So we basically thought, oh, this would be a nice sort of quiet way to celebrate our 10 years—because again, it was authentic to have him on because we had him on our first show.

How did you calibrate your questions for the second half of that segment, where you’re asking him the more substantive things? Because I think it’s safe to say you don’t want Donald Trump to be the next president.

I mean, I’m an undecided voter. For me, it’s between Biden and RFK Jr. A tight heat. [laughs]

So you don’t want to just be lobbing softballs, but you probably also don’t want to ask something that is not going to go as well for him. Is that part of the calculus for you?

Well, here’s the calculus. There are things I want to ask about. I think if you say, what’s a softball, it’s asking him about the former president. He’s going to be, let’s assume, loaded for bear there. And it’s going to be something with a high likelihood of the audience in the studio that night enjoying. But nothing was off-limits. We talked about Israel. And so when I ask a question like that, there’s no steering that I can do once I ask. When a politician is giving an answer, it feels like your role is sort of to get out of the way and let them communicate directly to the audience.

You mentioned Day Drinking earlier. You’ve said before that you feel like you can only do a couple of those a year, because otherwise, it seems like maybe you have a problem.

But I have a new problem: Day Drinking’s red hot. People want to day-drink. It used to be easy to say we’re only doing it twice a year, because nobody wanted to do it. Now it's hard. And that’s where I have so much respect for Sean Evans at Hot Ones. Because nobody’s like, ‘That guy’s got a chicken wing problem. We gotta step in.’ Nobody was like, ‘Oh, [James] Corden’s in the car, he’s carpooling too much.’ My one franchise is just like, genuinely a bad look.

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So then how do you choose? What makes a good Day Drinking guest? A lot of them are women. I’m not sure if that’s intentional.

Sure. But I would say [Will] Forte was one of my favorites. Post Malone, really fun. We look to have someone where you see a side of them that you wouldn’t normally. You know, I was enthralled and delighted to spend an afternoon with Kristen Stewart—who I think is just a tremendous actor, and maybe we sometimes miss how fun she is. So that is an ideal day-drinking guest. And also let’s be honest, I’m a super fun drunk. I’m a super fun person to drink with.

In those moments when you’ve had several drinks, how aware are you of what you’re doing and how funny you’re being? Can you control yourself in those moments?

Very good question. I would say the hardest part for me is like, the first half hour. We’re having drinks, but no one’s actually feeling it yet. And we’re maybe playing some dumb guessing game, and you’re just like, “this is so bad. If this was on the show right now, if I was doing this in front of an audience right now, people would be like, ‘why are they doing that?’”

Luckily you don’t have to record them live.

If it’s ever Live Day Drinking on Late Night, just know we’ve completely run out of ideas. And then I will allow the intervention.

It seems like a Strike Force Five Day Drinking would make a lot of sense.

I wonder. I will say, the longer Strike Force Five got, I feel as though we all learned how to share the mic.

Does the competitive nature of the Emmys put tension on the fond friendships that you guys have formed?

This’ll be our second Emmys since Strike Force Five. And I would say that it was better for having done Strike Force Five. If anything, we were like, we feel bad for the winner. He must feel as though he’s on an island right now. [The last Emmy for outstanding talk series went to Trevor Noah, for his final season of The Daily Show.]

Well, John Oliver did get to go to a different category—outstanding scripted variety series—and still win.

He did. And it just means the world to us. You know what happened to me the other night? John and I are doing a residency at the Beacon Theater in New York, and at the end we do a Q & A. And the first question at the last one was, “Hey, I just want to congratulate you both for getting nominated for a WGA award, and John, congratulations on winning.” So that’s how I found out on stage. So happy for John to get another one.

I can tell. The sincerity is just oozing out.

No, I’m happy for him. I’m so happy for him! This is my regular voice! I wonder how long the splitting of categories will last—but it was very sweet to have at least one year where John moved to a different category, and then to find out we wouldn’t win anyway. I think all of us were like, “But we’re second, right? No? Okay. Officially not.”

You do have an Emmy, for SNL, though. You went right from there to Late Night, and you have a contract through 2025. Do you feel like these sorts of production schedules are something you can keep up with for the foreseeable future? Do you yearn for anything different?

I don’t. I like having the sort of schedule where I can do other things—host seven podcasts, do standup. But mostly, I feel so fortunate because I have a showbiz job that is mostly home games. I’ve got this studio, where it feels like a family now. I’ve been working in the same building for 20-plus years. I really like this feeling, and I like how it lines up with being a dad. It’s a good schedule for my kids.

So how worried are you for America if Trump wins in November? If that happens, do you think it’ll be difficult to keep doing the show?

I think it would be difficult. My relief was palpable in 2020, when it was official that he was not going to be president. And, I should note, this was months before he came to that conclusion.

I remember having to, like, sit down because I was just so relieved that we wouldn’t have to go through it all again. And how dark a second term would feel, based on what we knew about him. Not just the darkness of him—the darkness that you live in a country where more people think, “let’s do that again. Let’s run that back.” This speaks to my political predictions—I’m massively wrong all the time. But I would have said after that, “it’s not like he’s gonna ever be a nominee again.” And then here we are. So yeah, it’s a very weird feeling.

In 2016, Les Moonves was speaking about the Republican primaries. He said that Trump may not be good for America, but he’s good for CBS. So that’s not where your head’s at with Trump.

I do still think it’s good for CBS, and only CBS. No, that’s not where my head’s at. Again, look, I was certainly guilty in the late part of 2015 and the early part of 2016 of thinking, “Oh my God, this is great.” I certainly underestimated his electoral chances back then.

How did you feel about SNL having him on as a host back then?

I thought, “Oh, of course.” I really did. Because I didn’t take it seriously. And if anything, I thought it would make him look smaller and sillier. The only reason not to do it was he had kind of been a bummer host in 2004…. I think some people were certainly far more aware going into that of how it would actually look.

So how do you avoid burnout on Trump stuff? How do you keep finding new things to say?

It’s not like, “what are our jokes about Trump today?” We never think of it like that way. We think like, “what are our jokes about the news today?” We try not to write anything we could have written yesterday. And that way, it has a freshness to it. Now, of course, he generates more news out of the ordinary and outside of any norms you’ve come to expect. So, naturally, that’s always what you point out. You don’t point out what, what is normal. You tend to point out what is abnormal.

And there’s no shortage of those things.

There’s no shortage. No, it’s crazy. I mean, it’s crazy! That's my deft take on it. “This guy’s out there!”

That’s the trenchant commentary we expect from Late Night.

That’s what you come to Late Night for. 12:37, it just cuts to me and I’m like, “This is nuts!”