James Corden Says He Was Afraid He'd Get Fired from Late Late Show When He Started Hosting
Lester Cohen/Getty James Corden
James Corden is looking back on his career.
The British comedian, 42, opened up breaking out in the United States as the host of The Late Late Show with James Corden on Friday, admitting on The Drew Barrymore Show that he "constantly" lived in fear of getting fired after landing the gig.
"When we moved here, my wife and I, we had two kids at that point, and I wouldn’t allow us to buy furniture," he told host Drew Barrymore. "We rented all of our furniture because I said to my wife Julia, I said, 'I'm going to get fired, this won’t work. And as soon as we get fired, we’ll just want to get back to London, so we don’t want to be lumbered with a couch.' "
The Cats actor continued, "And I did that for two years and then eventually my wife was like, 'Please, can we buy some furniture?' And I was like, 'Okay, I think we are safe to buy furniture now.' That’s been every day of my adult life really, I’ve thought I’m going to get fired at some point."
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Having recently launched her own talk show, Barrymore, 45, told Corden that she could totally relate.
"It’s just refreshing to hear you felt that way because I joke about it all the time, but I’m not really joking," she revealed. "I’m like, 'No, I’m getting fired.' It’s just like a comedic mechanism of being afraid that I’m going to lose this at any second."
However, Corden believes how Barrymore is currently feeling is "quite a healthy point of view."
"I think outside of even work, just in life, if you can constantly try to Google Earth yourself, realize where you are, realize what you are doing, fundamentally hang on to the very things that are important. Counting those blessings and checking your privilege and all those things I think are really useful and necessary things to do," he explained.
Kevin Winter/Getty James Corden
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Corden took over The Late Late Show from Craig Ferguson in 2015. Since then, the show spawned several widely successful segments, including "Drop the Mic," "Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts" and "Carpool Karaoke," which debuted as an Apple Music series in 2017.
Last month, Corden returned to a brand-new set in Los Angeles after spending 10 weeks filming his show remotely from his garage amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
In a studio tour for Entertainment Tonight, Corden said that the set — which features glass shields and various sanitation stands — was built to follow safety precautions.
"We built a studio with the safety guidelines that would [make it] the safest way to make a show in this room, with crew being far enough apart," he told the outlet. "That's what we tried to do, and it was a long process of trying to get it to that point."
