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Graham Norton recalls Harvey Weinstein forcing himself onto his talk show

Graham Norton recalls Harvey Weinstein forcing himself onto his talk show
Graham Norton recalls Harvey Weinstein forcing himself onto his talk show


Graham Norton; Harvey Weinstein on The Graham Norton Show in 2015

Hindsight is 20/20—and that perfect vision has given Graham Norton a perfect answer to the question, “Who is your least favorite guest?” The host of popular BBC talk show The Graham Norton Show has welcomed a wide variety of celebrities in his 15 years on the air, but at a recent event in Dublin to promote his novel Forever Home, he singled out one notorious Hollywood figure as being the absolute worst.

“I often talk around who my least favorite guest was, but now, someone reminded me, I have a really good answer to this now. It’s Harvey Weinstein,” Norton said (according to Joe Magazine, in attendance at the event). “He’s in jail, so he gets the prize for the worst guest ever.”

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Weinstein, a convicted sex offender, wasn’t just a default pick based on his legal troubles; Norton offered an anecdote to support the choice: “And actually, it was weird, because he asked for my email. And he emailed me something very nice, a complimentary thing. And then he decided he wanted to be on the show, because he was going to promote something,” he explained. “And it was a show that was fully booked, so I replied saying ‘Oh, thank you so much, but the show is fully booked.’ He emailed back: ‘What if I blah de blah de blah.’ [I replied] ‘No, the show is fully booked, blah de blah.’”

“And he emailed back again, ‘But I think...,’ and I just had to turn to my booker and say ‘Can you please deal with this?’ And at the time, I thought that sort of attitude, that kind of ‘Oh no, I’m going on,’ that is what makes you a very good producer,” Norton said of the infamous bully bullying his way onto the show (a 2015 episode that also featured David Tennant, Olivia Colman, and Jessie J).

“But of course, now that we know what we know, that is what makes him a predator,” Norton concluded. “It was that kind of weird, tunnel-vision thing. And it was sort of chilling in retrospect, because I was just laughing at those emails. But you realize ‘Oh my God, that is an insight into how that man is.’”