James Corden has opened up about his decision to leave The Late Late Show after eight years.
In April, the British actor announced that he was stepping down from hosting the US late night show in 2023.
On Monday (2 January), Corden appeared on Drew Barrymore’s daytime talk show, where the former child star asked him when he knew it was the right time to “walk away”.
“Look, it’s not easy in any way to walk away from something… [when] I’ll never work in a better environment than the one I work in now,” he said, with tears in his eyes.
“Nothing about leaving the show was to do with not enjoying it, I love it. But the truth is it became a very easy decision because I always knew it was an adventure and I never ever considered it to be the final destination.”
Corden, 44, then explained that he was leaving the show in order to settle in London and spend more time with his family, recalling an interaction with his 11-year-old son Max that changed his perspective.
“I was filming [Mammals] on a Sunday and I came downstairs, it was about 6am and my son, who was 10 at the time, was sat on the stairs and he said, ‘Are you working today?’ and I said, ‘I am,’ and he said, ‘I thought, but it’s Sunday.’
“And I said, “I know buddy, but this schedule’s just all over the place. We’ve just got to get it done because we only have a tiny amount of time before we have to go back and do the show’ and his face just kind of dropped.”
“I got in the car and I called my wife Jules and I said, ‘I’ve realised, best case scenario we have six more summers where Max even remotely wants to be around us and I cannot waste another one.’”
The Gavin and Stacey star explained that “really the choice was to go, ‘Well if I really want to do this other work, that cannot be at the expense of our children, our family’”.
“I will be a mess on that last show,” he continued. “I will cry my eyes out, but I will know at my core that the best thing for me and the best thing for us as a family is to put down some roots in London, and it feels absolutely right in every single way.”
Along with Max, Corden shares two more children with wife Julia: Carey, eight, and Charlotte, five.
The actor is expected to leave The Late Late Show in mid-2023.
