The 83rd annual Golden Globes are this Sunday, and the hostess with the mostest leading the night is Nikki Glaser. Returning for the second year in a row, the comedian has been sharing some insight into one of the biggest nights in Hollywood.
At the red carpet roll-out on Thursday, she made it very clear she's feeling antsy about telling jokes about some of the biggest A-listers in the world right to their face. Leonardo DiCaprio, Julia Roberts, and George Clooney are the big three she's nervous about.
And all for different reasons, DiCaprio, for example, was part of her "sexual awakening" when she saw him in Romeo and Juliet, "That and Fear, when Reese Witherspoon's on the roller coaster with Mark Wahlberg," she told HOLA! I "know he's like a villain in that, but that did it for me, too."
With celebrity plus-ones who have just as much star power, Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner, for example, we asked Glaser whether those seats in the audience are fair game. “Yeah, I didn’t even think about Kylie until the other day,” she admitted. “Someone asked me about it, and I hadn’t even thought to. She’s just there—she feels almost untouchable. But there’s so much there. We know so much. I may know more about her than anyone else in that room.”
Since then, the idea has been sitting with her. “I’ve kind of thought about how I could interact with her in some way,” Glaser said, adding that she genuinely finds Jenner funny. “That’s what I’ve found about the Kardashians—you think they’re probably sensitive because they’ve been mocked for so long and have been in the spotlight forever.”
In reality, she’s discovered the opposite to be true. “They have a thicker skin. They don’t take anything too seriously,” she said. “They can have relationships with people who have joked about them. They forgive and truly forget, and I like that about them.”
Misconceptions about hosting
As for the misconceptions about the hosting awards she shares, "I did not know, in watching award shows, that this job is so difficult." "Like I always heard that people don't really want this job. It's kind of hard for people to find hosts of these shows, and once they find them, that's why they have them year after year after year, because it's a rare talent to have," she shares.
She added that it’s not just about ability, but willingness. “It’s also just rare that someone wants to take that risk. It’s live TV. It’s in front of, like, the most stuffy people—famous people in the world—and they’re all fully lit.”
From a comedy standpoint, she explained, that setting works against you. “For good comedy to happen, it’s generally in a dark room,” she said. Laughing, she noted, means admitting, “I think that too,” which can feel uncomfortable for celebrities when everyone can see them. “It’s embarrassing for people to laugh when they’re fully lit, especially if it might be at the expense of someone next to them.” “Everything in that room,” she says, “is kind of conspiring to be bad for comedy,” something viewers don’t always realize from home.
She also pointed to a larger shift in how audiences consume entertainment. “What your fodder is, is movies and TV that people aren’t seeing as much as we used to see everything,” she said. With so much content available, “not everyone’s seen” buzzy titles like Marty Supreme, Sinners, or One Battle After Another.
That reality, she explained, is why the Globes' expanding into podcast categories makes sense. “That’s what people are actually watching clips of,” she said, even as movies and TV continue playing on the bigger screen.