“Every place I went, they’re like ‘Conan was here,’” Kimmel said. “What the Smurfs are to Belgium, Conan is to Ireland. He is everywhere you go.”
Noting that he’s “100 percent Irish,” as his family emigrated from the Emerald Isle to America, O’Brien spoke about a previous trip he took to the country, when he got a chance to visit where his great-grandfather, Thomas O’Brien, once lived in Galbally, Ireland. The opportunity came up while he was filming a 2024 episode of his Emmy-winning travelogue series “Conan O’Brien Must Go.”
“We had these jokes loaded up, we had props, funny things we were going to do. I was going to try out some ‘Train Dreams’ material,” O’Brien joked. “But I got there, and I did not expect this because I’m not someone that wears my emotions on my sleeves, but I got emotional. It’s very powerful.”
O’Brien revealed that his great-grandfather was a tenant farmer and lived on a “very small plot of land” that he didn’t own. Struggling to get by, he made the difficult decision to leave his homeland.
“They didn’t have money, and he needed to move on because it wasn’t working,” explained O’Brien. “So he left and went to America, and here I am a couple generations later.”
“I have incredible empathy for people who have immigrated to another country,” he added. “Often it’s people who are coming to a country where they don’t speak the language, and they have to spend their entire lives just getting things started for the next generation.”
O’Brien revealed that he was “overcome” by emotion while thinking about his great-grandfather’s sacrifice.
“I was just thinking about this guy, who I’ll never meet, [who] had to do that,” O’Brien said. “I was overcome by the fact that there’s a lot of sadness in that story and in a lot of these stories.”
“People leave not because, ‘Hey, I just want to go have fun in America,’” he added. “They leave because they have to.”
Matt Juul can be reached at [email protected].
First Appeared on
Source link
Leave feedback about this