The biggest stars in the world have done “Carpool Karaoke” with James Corden. Adele. Madonna. Will Smith. Even First Lady Michelle Obama. But there is one singer who says he will never do the popular Late Late Show segment that has now become a standalone series on Apple Music.
“No, thank you very much,” the Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher told British GQ last month. “No fucking chance mate. With that fat bloke from Kevin and Perry?”
Gallagher was referring to Gavin & Stacey, the British sitcom that Corden starred in before taking over The Late Late Show on CBS in 2015. “I don’t need to watch it to know I won’t like it. James Corden is a knobhead,” he added.
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“I did see that, yeah,” Corden tells The Daily Beast during a new interview for a larger piece that will appear next week.
“God, I just don’t know how we’ll carry on,” he adds with deep snark in his voice. “I don’t how we’ll even think of carrying on. Yeah, God, what will we do?”
If his feelings were hurt by Gallagher’s comments, Corden doesn’t let on. And he’s right, “Carpool Karaoke” is doing just fine without the presence of his home country’s most notoriously combative rock star.
The segment has delivered The Late Late Show the three most-watched YouTube videos in all of late-night television, with Adele at No. 1 with 166 million views, followed by Justin Bieber at 121 million and One Direction at 109 million.
In addition to the Apple Music version of “Carpool Karaoke,” Corden is executive producing Drop the Mic for TBS in which celebrities compete in rap battles, an idea that also started out as a popular Late Late Show segment featuring performers like Riz Ahmed, Jennifer Hudson and, most recently, Samuel L. Jackson.
“Look, to have two separate spin-off shows on two separate platforms in a year, those shows are being commissioned because of the volume of people watching them on YouTube and the buzz that is generated from that,” Corden says, not because of The Late Late Show’s TV ratings.
Stay tuned for our profile of James Corden, including his thoughts on the hyper-politicization of late-night television and what it was like to host his show from London just a couple of days after a deadly terror attack there.
