Stephen Colbert on life in N.J., the pandemic and the pizza he craved every night – NJ.com

Stephen Colbert pointed to the Manhattan skyline.

“Over there I’m just a stress monster,” he said, sitting comfortably at his New Jersey home.

Though some locals dread the New York commute, the “Late Show” host said he quickly realized the benefit of time in transit.

The equation goes something like this:

Music plus distance equals a calm talk show host.

“12 miles, I’m a human being — mostly — again,” Colbert said at a Friday night fundraiser for Montclair Film. The nonprofit is celebrating 10 years of the Montclair Film Festival this year.

Colbert, 56, seemed at peace with his surroundings: Garden State greenery and a romantic vista of the city across the river, complete with dramatic cloudscape and a glint of skyscrapers in the distance. He has lived in Montclair for two decades with his wife, actor and producer Evelyn “Evie” McGee-Colbert, and their children.

The late-night host and McGee-Colbert, president of the Montclair Film board of trustees, sat down at their home for a virtual talk to benefit the local film festival.

Tom Hall, executive director of Montclair Film, hosted the fundraiser, which organizers said generated more than $150,000 for the festival and other programming. (Encore viewings are available through May 14.)

This is the 10th such benefit, and Colbert has been there for every single one. Normally, the event would take place in early December at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, where Colbert would be “in conversation” with a celebrity.

He usually reaches out to ask big names to attend. The tactic has yielded some pretty impressive A-listers.

Past guests have included Jersey’s own Jon Stewart and Meryl Streep as well as Steve Carell, Samantha Bee, Jimmy Fallon, John Oliver and “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” director J.J. Abrams.

The last such fundraiser, held in 2019, welcomed Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The film festival skipped the 2020 benefit because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2021 Montclair Film Festival will also be a fall affair, set for Oct. 21 to 30, but this time organizers say it will be an in-person event.

Last year, Montclair Film Festival, which usually happens in the spring, was postponed until October 2020 because of COVID-19.

Festival programmers adapted to social distancing by hosting virtual and drive-in screenings of films like Oscar best picture winner “Nomadland,” based on the book from Jessica Bruder, who grew up in Montclair.

At the virtual benefit, Hall reflected on some of the greatest hits from the annual fundraiser, like when Colbert and John Oliver had a pillow fight using pillows emblazoned with an American flag and Union Jack. The whimsical moment arrived in the wake of the 2016 presidential election and Brexit referendum. It was a particularly tense time, and the talk did turn to weighty matters, but the meeting of late-night hosts ultimately offered a breather from the constant barrage of stressful headlines.

Though he gets to interview celebrities every day on “The Late Show,” Colbert still considers the benefit a different kind of event.

“I do this all the time, but I do it in, at best, 15- to 20-minute chunks,” he said. “To be able to have two hours with an artist, it’s an extraordinary and a privileged experience to be able to do it every year.”

Fellow late-night host Jimmy Fallon jumped at the opportunity to volunteer his time without knowing the location or details.

“It’s not an act,” Colbert said of Fallon. “He’s really just a lovely guy.”

He also reflected on the pandemic and his home’s place in it, including national television.

During the pandemic, the Colberts found themselves working together on something other than the film festival — “The Late Show.” To be more specific, “A Late Show,” which was the new name for the CBS show after it relocated to a remote setting in the Colbert home.

After the 2020 Broadway shutdown, which closed the Ed Sullivan Theater where he films “The Late Show,” Colbert famously hosted the late-night show from his bathtub and various other parts of his house in Montclair before moving the remote production to a second home in Charleston, South Carolina.

During the pandemic, McGee-Colbert became a kind of production supervisor, assisting with Zoom and plugging in and unplugging things as needed, especially in a crisis.

Colbert said that it has been odd having no audience and no dealings with staff on set.

“It feels to me as if I’m shouting my show into an empty Altoid tin and then throwing it off an overpass onto the interstate,” he said. “There’s no sense of feedback at all.”

Though the Colberts have lived in New Jersey for 21 years, they both hail from Charleston (Colbert grew up as one of 11 children). The “Late Show” host said the pandemic made him think differently about his adopted state.

“This last year of crisis has made me feel that New Jersey is my home,” said Colbert, who is now back to hosting “The Late Show” in New York (Broadway reopens Sept. 14).

It also had him refuting false assumptions about his hair. Yes, it is more gray than before. No, it’s not because he couldn’t get to a stylist. He never dyed it in the first place, as McGee-Colbert was quick to confirm.

That answer arrived courtesy of a question from a member of the audience, Craigslist founder and festival donor Craig Newmark. He had asked Colbert why he looked so different from an interview he did with the entrepreneur 15 years ago.

The answer: age, but also “Donald Trump,” as whispered by McGee-Colbert. Her husband did not disagree.

Colbert also talked about some of his own New Jersey treasures, like Paulie Pizza on Route 3 in Clifton, where the former “Colbert Report” host was a regular on drives back to Jersey.

“My greatest joy was after a long night of shooting just to roll into Paulie (and) sit there,” Colbert said. “There was an old man. He didn’t talk, you didn’t talk. He was always making the fresh pies, gave you a slice. Fountain Coke.”

Alas, Paulie — no, not Paulie’s, he was careful to note — has since closed.

The Colberts moved to Montclair at the end of the ‘90s after losing their tony rent-controlled digs in Manhattan, with a stop in Westchester’s Bronxville/Mount Vernon area in between. They had gotten wind of someone selling a house without a broker in the Essex County town, and seized on theh opportunity.

“I love it out here,” Colbert said. “We kind of instantly realized that we had lucked into a great community.”

“It was fantastic,” said McGee-Colbert, 57. “We moved in right when the train (direct to New York) started, so Montclair real estate took off.”

In the beginning, Colbert took the DeCamp bus and train into the city. Later, he would drive.

The Montclair Film Festival’s founder and chairman, Bob Feinberg, vice president and general counsel at WNET (parent company of Thirteen, among other PBS TV stations), reached out to McGee-Colbert more than a decade ago to see if she and Stephen were interested in helping him mount a film festival.

Feinberg had found inspiration in Sundance in Park City, Utah, but McGee-Colbert said they wanted to create an event that was more intimate and tied to the local community. The inaugural Montclair Film Festival took place in 2012. The festival’s series of screenings and special events has grown exponentially since then, drawing major talents and cinephiles to Essex County, along with year-round programming under the Montclair Film banner.

Colbert was the celebrity guest at the very first fundraiser. Originally, the events were closed to press. That is, until a reporter bought a ticket to the benefit, anyway. That year, Jon Stewart was the guest. Stewart had been told he could say whatever he wanted, and that the event wasn’t being recorded. So when he was asked about his least-favorite “Daily Show” guest, he freely made comments about Hugh Grant.

“There had been a bad experience with him,” Colbert explained. The news about Stewart’s Hugh Grant moment blew up.

“It went like wildfire,” Colbert said — but Stewart shrugged it off.

Later, after organizers realized the unexpected coverage drew more attention to the festival, they opened the event to press. When media outlets pair Colbert’s name with the festival, “it helps us tremendously,” Hall said.

For now, Colbert is hoping, and organizers are anticipating, that next year’s fundraiser will return to NJPAC in Newark.

“There’s something about that space, because it’s almost European,” Colbert said. “It’s vertical. It’s like those European opera houses. It’s this barrel with the wonderful balconies. It’s a gem of New Jersey.”

With each of the fundraisers, Colbert usually delves somewhat into each celebrity’s origin story. Hall did the same for the Colberts.

They both grew up in the Charleston, South Carolina area, at one point living just a street or so apart, but didn’t hang out as kids. However, they were not strangers to each other when they “met.”

“I met Stephen three times before I actually liked him,” McGee-Colbert said.

“Before it took,” Colbert mused.

She had seen him when she was a teenager, but it was a chance encounter at another arts festival — Charleston’s Spoleto Festival — that sparked their relationship.

Both had since relocated to other states. McGee-Colbert was on a home visit after attending acting school in New York, where she lived. Colbert was visiting from Chicago, where he lived and worked with comedy improv troupe The Second City.

McGee-Colbert saw Colbert walking to a theater with his mother on his arm.

“I remember thinking, ‘That man loves his mother,’” she said. The timing was serendipitous.

Colbert wasn’t even supposed to be at the theater that night, but his sister couldn’t go, so he did. He had recently gotten an ultimatum from his then-girlfriend that he either needed to marry her or break up. He asked for a week to make a decision.

Colbert’s mother asked him if he wanted to marry her.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“‘I don’t know’ isn’t good enough,” she replied. From there, Colbert figured he had “a week to kill.” He got closer to McGee-Colbert and they struck up a long-distance relationship, writing letters to each other. Eventually, she moved to Chicago. They got married in 1993, started a family and moved to New York.

In New York, Colbert met a young acting hopeful named Jennifer Garner on the set of the Michael J. Fox sitcom “Spin City.”

She needed work, so the Colberts hired her as a babysitter. When she announced that she would be moving West to pursue her dream, they figured it was a long shot:

“Los Angeles is going to chew up another one,” they remembered thinking. That is, until billboards went up for a new series called “Alias.”

Right there, next to the woman in the catsuit who was holding a gun, was the name:

Jennifer Garner.

McGee-Colbert was surprised — Garner was never “hot,” was she?

“Yes, she was,” Colbert replied.

Needless to say, he had never before offered commentary on the attractiveness of the babysitter.

Tickets are available to catch the replay of the Montclair Film Festival fundraiser with Stephen Colbert and Evie McGee-Colbert through May 14; watch.eventive.org/montclairfilm.

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.