Conan O’Brien is revealing secrets about hosting the Oscars 2025.
The comedian, 61, recently had Oscars head writer Mike Sweeney on his “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast and they discussed the jokes and sketches that had to be cut from the 97th Academy Awards, including a promo that would’ve featured O’Brien and a 9-foot-tall Oscar statue playing a domestic couple.
“We’re fighting about things couples fight about,” O’Brien explained of the scrapped skit. “At one point, I thought wouldn’t it be great if it’s just on the couch? Let’s lay it on a really big couch and I’ll be vacuuming and say, ‘Could you at least lift your feet? Or could you at least get up and help? Load the dishwasher?’”
“We wanted to do it and they just said, ‘No, no no, that can’t happen,’” O’Brien said of the Academy.
The TV host added, “One of the people from the Academy came forward and said, ‘Oscar can never be horizontal.’ And that blew my mind. Like, wow, this is like the thigh bone of St. Peter. This is a religious icon.”
O’Brien and Sweeney also said that they wanted to put an apron on the Oscar statue and dress it up like a housewife serving O’Brien leftovers, but the Academy similarly shot that idea down.
“No clothing on Oscar. Oscar is always naked,” O’Brien said the organization told him.
This year’s Oscars opened with a “Wicked” performance followed by O’Brien spoofing the Demi Moore movie “The Substance.” But according to the comedian, he had bigger ideas to kick off the show.
“It was the idea that, ‘Oh, Conan’s now going to goof on all the movies,’” O’Brien said on the podcast. “It starts with me and I’m in ‘Wicked’ and I’m all green, finishing ‘Defying Gravity’ or one of those songs. And I finish it and then you cut to the next thing, which is ‘Gladiator II’ and ‘clang, clang, clang’ with swords and you see that I’m a gladiator but then you notice that I’m still green. And then you go on to ‘Conclave’ and you see people voting with their ballots and one of the hands is still green.”
O’Brien said that then he would’ve been in “Dune: Part 2” where Javier Bardem, while in character, was going to call out O’Brien for being in green for “Wicked” at the start of the parody.
“The whole thing was that the dye wouldn’t come off and we had to shoot it in one day,” O’Brien revealed.
“We loved it,” Sweeney said of the axed skit. “It was hammered out before the fires happened, and even after that we kind of honed it.”
The Academy ultimately decided to open the Oscars with a performance by “Wicked” stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in a tribute to Los Angeles following the devastating wildfires.
O’Brien noted on his podcast that despite some of his ideas getting scrapped by the Academy, he’s still grateful he had the opportunity to host the show.
“They ended up being very helpful, I want to stress that,” O’Brien said. “They were great, and the ABC people were fantastic.”
