The “Late Show” host’s conversation about grief with Anderson Cooper from 2019 connected with millions.

Stephen Colbert looks back on viral interview about the deaths of his father and brothers: ‘I was very surprised’

The "Late Show" host's conversation about grief with Anderson Cooper from 2019 connected with millions.

By Derek Lawrence

Derek Lawrence

Derek Lawrence is a former associate editor at **. He left EW in 2022.

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May 19, 2026 12:41 p.m. ET

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Stephen Colbert at the Emmy Awards in 2017. Credit:

Lester Cohen/WireImage

- On Tuesday, Stephen Colbert looked back on his conversation with Anderson Cooper about grief from 2019.

- During the interview, the *Late Show* host spoke about the loss of his father and two brothers in a plane crash when he was 10.

- Colbert said he was surprised by the viral sensation that the interview became.

As he reaches the end of his reign on *The Late Show*, Stephen Colbert is reflecting on the time that he was the one being interviewed.

In 2019, Colbert sat down with Anderson Cooper in the wake of the death of Cooper's mother, Gloria Vanderbilt. Colbert had written a letter to Cooper, telling him, "I hope you find peace in your grief." Then, during their conversation on the journalist's podcast, Colbert opened up about the tragic loss of his father and two brothers in a plane crash when he was just 10 years old.

“Ten million people had seen it in the first 24 hours or something,” Colbert said to PEOPLE on Tuesday.

“It makes sense because everyone experiences grief, if you're lucky, if you love someone enough to feel the great loss of that,” said Colbert.

“But I was very surprised because it’s not something that I had talked about publicly, and it felt innate to my view of the world, but I didn’t realize that that experience I had would be so meaningful to other people,” he went on.

“It seems obvious and a very simple thing to realize, but it did take me by surprise,” he concluded.

On Sept. 11, 1974, Colbert's dad, Dr. James Colbert Jr., and two of Colbert's 10 siblings, Peter and Paul, were flying on Eastern Air Lines Flight 212, when a flight error caused the plane to crash near the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina. Colbert's father and brothers were among the 72 people to die in the crash.

“I was struck with this realization that I had a gratitude for the pain of that grief,” Colbert told Cooper in 2019. “It doesn't take the pain away. It doesn't make the grief less profound. In some ways, it makes it more profound because it allows you to look at it.”

He continued, “It allows you to examine your grief in a way that is not like holding a red, hot ember in your hands, but rather seeing that pain as something that can warm you and light your knowledge of what other people might be going through, which is really just another way of saying there is a value to having experienced it.”

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When NBA icon Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna died in a helicopter crash in 2020, Colbert spoke on the "strange connection" he felt to him.

“I never got to meet [Bryant] but I do feel a strange connection in this moment, one I wouldn’t wish on anybody,” Colbert said. “One of the terrible things about that shock and the heartbreaking unreality, nightmare quality of someone huge in your life who just disappears, the center of your love disappearing in that moment, is not knowing what happened.”

Colbert's final *Late Show* is set to air Thursday, May 21, on CBS.

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