Conan O'Brien recalls Robin Williams' kindness after Tonight Show exit

Conan O'Brien is looking back on a memorable interaction with Robin Williams , revealing that the late actor reached out to make sure he was okay after his unceremonious ouster from The Tonight Show.

"I was lucky enough to have some great interactions with Robin Williams before he passed," O'Brien told guest Eric Idle on a recent episode of his Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast. "One of the most memorable examples to me is when I went through my whole Tonight Show debacle. Finally, the show is done, and I don't know if I have a career anymore. What am I gonna do next? I'm lying on the floor in the living room of my house, and my phone rings, and I pick it up, and it's Robin Williams."

"I don't even know how he got my phone number," added O'Brien. On the other line, Williams asked, "'How are you holding up, chief?' And he said, you know, 'You're gonna be fine, you're gonna be great.'" Then came an endearing gesture: Williams, who was into bicycling and knew O'Brien also liked to bike, instructed him to go down to a bike shop in Santa Monica, where he had a cruiser set up for him.

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"And I said, 'What?'" recalled O'Brien. "And he said, 'No, no, no, just head on down there. Ride around, you'll feel better.' And I went down and it was a Colnago, which is a very nice bike. And he said, 'I told him to paint it in all these crazy Irish colors.' I get down there and it's the most ugliest— I mean, it was just greens and shamrocks and everything. And he was like, 'You're going to like that bike, chief. Don't worry about it.'"

"I thanked him many, many times," added O'Brien. "I just couldn't believe that he was thinking about me."

Idle, who had a close friendship with the late comedian, called the gesture "typical" of Williams. "He would put a lot of effort into making you feel better," said Idle. "That's fantastically typical Robin. That generosity and kindness combined with the wit of the man is not a common combination."

O'Brien famously succeeded Jay Leno as Tonight Show host in 2009, a position he held for only seven months before his firing. NBC opted to bring back Leno — who had been given a 10 p.m. series — after both hosts experienced rating and time-slot struggles on the network. (It took less than a year into O'Brien's tenure for NBC to cancel Leno's new prime-time show.) O'Brien then went on to host Conan for 11 seasons on TBS. "It was like a marriage breaking up suddenly, violently, quickly," O'Brien told CBS of the debacle in 2010 .

His recollection of Williams' act of kindness came after Idle said that Williams taught him how to be nice to fans. "I would just tell them to f- off and they would laugh and go away, you know?" said Idle of his fan interactions. "And that became a thing. Then I watched Robin and his empathy, remembering that this is somebody's moment in their life and it's a big moment in their life because they've waited, they love you, they want this moment. So if you are shit or dismissive, it's a nasty memory."