Tonight's guest on The Daily Show is Conan O'Brien and the topic on The Nightly Show will be Mars and space travel with panelists Lee Daniels, Don Cheadle, Sonia Van Meter, and Ricky Velez.
Conan O'Brien is a television host, comedian, writer, producer, and voice actor. He is the host of Conan airing at 11:00 p.m. eastern on TBS. Tonight he is on to talk about his taking the show to Cuba.
Comedian Conan O’Brien has just spent several days filming in Havana for the March 4 episode of his late-night TBS Conan talk show, promising viewers a rare insight into Cuba since the 1962 U.S. embargo.
The last time an American show of its kind visited the country was in 1959, when Jack Paar of the Tonight Show interviewed Fidel Castro.
Conan O’Brien Just Filmed an Episode in Cuba
And it’s not your typical “host on location” segment, either. He won’t be sitting at his desk throwing to clips and making quips to the studio audience. Instead, O’Brien made the decision to cut the entire episode from Cuba. “We were walking around and saw a café and asked to borrow a café table and put a microphone on it,” O’Brien told a group of journalists earlier this afternoon. “There’s a band of three or four women who are playing – I asked them if they’d be my house band. We found a guy to be Cuban Andy [Richter] – who I actually have better chemistry with.”
O’Brien got the idea almost immediately after President Obama announced in December that sanctions against the country would be lifted immediately, making it easier for U.S. citizens to travel there. He and his small team entered Cuba through Miami, with his camera crew flying through Toronto. Quickly, they were taken aback by the lack of advertisements and Internet. They didn’t venture out of Havana, but taped segments where Conan learns to salsa dance, speak slang, and hand-roll cigars.
What was most important for the comedian was not coming off like a jerk. “The joke is usually on me,” he explained. “I wanted to go as a comedian who’s making fun of himself and see what makes people laugh. Everywhere we went, people were really open to meeting us. When I would improvise with them, they were really funny and quick.”Conan O’Brien Talks Taking ‘Conan’ to Cuba: ‘I Want to Do Something Radically Different’
It sounds interesting and I look forward to watching it.
Lee Daniels
is an American actor, film producer, and director. He produced Monster's Ball and directed Precious, which received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Director; the film won two of the awards. In 2013, Daniels directed The Butler, a historical fiction drama featuring an ensemble cast portraying unique events on the 20th century presidents of the United States at the White House.
Don Cheadle
is an American actor. Cheadle had an early role in Picket Fences and followed it with performances in Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Rosewood (1997) and Boogie Nights (1997). He then started a collaboration with director Steven Soderbergh that resulted in the movies Out of Sight (1998), Traffic (2000) and Ocean's Eleven (2001). Other Cheadle films include The Rat Pack (1998), Things Behind the Sun (2001), Swordfish (2001), Crash (2004), Ocean's Twelve (2004), Ocean's Thirteen (2007), Reign Over Me (2007), Talk to Me (2007), Traitor (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010) and Iron Man 3 (2013).
In 2004, his lead role as Rwandan hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina in the genocide drama film Hotel Rwanda, which was set during the Rwandan Genocide earned him a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actor. He stars as Marty Kaan on the Showtime sitcom House of Lies, for which he most recently won a Golden Globe Award in 2013.
He also campaigns for the end of genocide in Darfur, Sudan, and co-authored, with John Prendergast, a book concerning the issue entitled Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond. Along with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, David Pressman, and Jerry Weintraub, Cheadle co-founded the Not on Our Watch Project, an organization focusing global attention and resources to stop and prevent mass atrocities. In 2010, Cheadle was named U.N. Environment Program Goodwill Ambassador.
Sonia Van Meter
Sonia Van Meter is the Managing Director of Stanford Caskey, a national Democratic opposition research firm.
It’s a peculiar thing to imagine leaving Planet Earth forever. But when a Dutch nonprofit called the Mars One project announced in 2013 that it was accepting applications for a one-way trip to another planet, I didn’t think twice about signing up.
Now that I’m one of one hundred, the world is watching, looking to me for answers to questions that were easily brushed off when this was all just a fantastical daydream. The reality of this presses up against me, and I stay on message to protect that private space for me and my husband where I can face the hard questions that come at night. It’s one thing to imagine the good that can come from a manned mission to Mars, but it’s quite another to tally up the cost and see one’s life on the bill.
Ricky Velez
Ricky Velez is a stand-up comedian who was born and raised in Queens. Last month he was named "New York's Funniest" by the New York Comedy Festival and one of Comedy Central's "Comics to Watch."
This Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
Th 2/26: Olivia Wilde
Next Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
Mo 3/2: Robert Smigel
Tu 3/3: Sigourney Weaver
We 3/4: Viacheslav Fetisov
Th 3/5: Gerald Posner