John Lithgow slapped on a ridiculous bald cap and some oversized dentures, and pretended to be President Donald Trump’s embattled personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, for a ridiculous “interview” with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show Tuesday.
The segment opened with Colbert breaking down Giuliani’s recent downward spiral, from spewing conspiracy theories to getting wrapped up in the investigation of two Ukrainian associates who were recently arrested on campaign finance violations. For the bit, Lithgow channeled some sublime crazy-old-man energy, capturing Giuliani’s over-the-top expressiveness as he shushed Colbert’s questions and concocted even wilder conspiracy theories.
At one point, Colbert asked Giuliani about his plans to fly to Vienna, noting his two Ukrainian associates had been arrested with one-way tickets back to the Austrian capital. “Stephen, shhh!” Lithgow-as-Giuliani replied. “I was going to Vienna because I love classical music and I have reason to believe that Hunter Biden has stolen Mozart’s bones!”
Lithgow’s appearance on The Late Show followed an op-ed he published in the New York Times last week, in which he criticized Trump as not just a terrible president, but a terrible entertainer. “He reads scripted lines like a panic-stricken schoolboy at a middle school assembly,” Lithgow wrote. “He mangles every attempt at irony, self-mockery or, God forbid, an actual joke. He cravenly fills the hall for every rally with a hopped-up claque drawn from his hard-core base. And he can be grotesquely inappropriate at his public appearances, as when he babbled inanely about crowd size and margins of victory on recent condolence visits to Ohio and Texas after mass shootings in those states.”
