Lisa Kudrow told ex Conan O’Brien he was ‘no one’ when he succeeded Letterman

She’ll be there for him.

“Friends” star Lisa Kudrow reportedly gave her ex-boyfriend, Conan O’Brien, some unconventional encouragement when he was preparing to succeed David Letterman on NBC’s “Late Night.”  

According to a new Vanity Fair oral history of the first year of “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” his then-girlfriend, Kudrow, 60, said, “I don’t know how much we talked about it. I just knew, ‘You’re trying to replace David Letterman. No one replaces David Letterman. You’re no one.’ It can’t be anybody that an audience would know.”

Letterman, 76, helmed the show from 1982 to 1993 (before moving from NBC to CBS to host “The Late Show With David Letterman” from 1993 to his retirement in 2015).

O’Brien, 60, who led the show from Sept. 1993 to Feb. 2009, was an unknown at the time that he started, which Kudrow tried to say was a good thing. 

According to Vanity Fair, NBC was also considering Gary Shandling, at the time. 

O’Brien confessed that there were a lot of growing pains along the way. 

He called his team “very naïve” and said that they “just had to go through the spanking machine” to get the spot. 

“I had to develop from a fetal pig to a full-size pig in front of America,” O’Brien said. “And that just had to happen. There was no way around it.” 

“He just kept showing up as him,” said Kudrow. “He just kept being himself, with his own kind of humor and comedy, where if you just keep doing it, then people get it: ‘Oh, that’s you. This isn’t an awkward thing. It’s you.’” 

Kudrow and O’Brien were romantically linked briefly in the early ’90s, and have both since married — O’Brien married his wife, Liza Powell O’Brien, 53, in 2002, and Kudrow married her husband, Michel Stern, in 1995. O’Brien and Kudrow remain friends, however. She appeared on his podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” in 2019.

The show nearly got canceled several times, but Letterman appeared on it in 1994 to boost morale – both for O’Brien and for viewers. 

That same year, viewership went up.

“Suddenly the audiences became great. I didn’t know what was happening. And then it dawned on me,” O’Brien said. “Colleges let out. So college students started to come.”

After a short-lived stint in 2009, taking over for Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show,” O’Brien left after one year. About that experience – which saw him lose in ratings to Letterman, as his time slot was moved around, he told CBS in 2010, “This environment doesn’t feel right and I’ve been with these people a long time. And I don’t like, I really don’t like the way this is going.’ And when it started to get toxic and I started to feel that I’m not sure these people even really want me here. Let’s just…I can’t do it. I don’t know how thought out this whole thing was. But if they wanted me to leave, it worked.”

“The biggest thing people come up and say to me in gas stations and restaurants, I have so many people say this to me, ‘Hey partner, you got screwed.’ I don’t, and I always tell them, ‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t get screwed. I’m fine. It just didn’t work out.’”

He ultimately moved to hosting “Conan” on TBS from 2010 to 2021. 

“My advice to anyone watching right now — and it’s not easy to do, it’s not easy to do, but try; try and do what you love with people you love,” O’Brien said during that show’s final episode in 2021. “If you can manage that, it’s the definition of heaven on Earth.”