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‘I was overcome’: Conan O’Brien tells Jimmy Kimmel about ’emotional’ trip to Ireland
Conan O’Brien visited the site of his great-grandfather’s former home in Ireland, an experience the Brookline described as “emotional” and “powerful.”
Conan O’Brien prefers to keep things lighthearted on camera. But the longtime late-night host found himself at a loss for words during a segment the Brookline native filmed in Ireland for his travel show.
Ahead of his gig hosting the 2026 Oscars on Sunday, the Harvard alum visited “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” to commiserate about the highs and lows of hosting the Academy Awards, a job Kimmel performed four times.
After joking about how some of the films (like Netflix’s “Train Dreams”) don’t naturally lend themselves to one-liners, O’Brien shifted to discussing his HBO Max show, “Conan O’Brien Must Go.”
In one episode, O’Brien (who is “100.00 percent” Irish) heads to Galbally, Ireland to see his great-grandfather Thomas O’Brien’s former home.
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After preparing a raft of jokes and gags for the segment, O’Brien instead found himself touched by the visit.
“I’m not someone who wears my emotions on my sleeves, but I got emotional,” O’Brien said. “It’s very powerful when you’re standing there.”
O’Brien went on to describe how his great-grandfather, a tenant farmer with little to no money, made the tough choice to leave Ireland and try to make a better life in America.
Visiting that empty patch of land, O’Brien said, put the entire immigration process into perspective.
“I have incredible empathy for people who have immigrated to another country, because it takes an entire lifetime to go to a country where […] they don’t speak the language, and they have to spend their entire lives just getting things started for the next generation,” O’Brien said. “And it’s a whole lifetime that you’re feeding into this process.
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“I was just thinking about how this guy, who I’ll never meet, had to do that,” O’Brien continued. “And I think I was overcome by that. I was overcome by the fact that there’s a lot of sadness in that story, and in a lot of these stories. People don’t leave [their home country] because ‘Hey, I want to have fun in America,’ they leave because they have to.”
Watch Conan O’Brien on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’:
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