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The reason why Dax Shepard was banned from ‘Conan’
Dax Shepard has been around the block more than a few times. One of the most famous comedy actors of the 21st Century, many will remember him as an almost ubiquitous force in movies released during the 2000s, with the American actor starring in a range of classics that include Without a Paddle, Employee of the Month, and Idiocracy. More recently, Shepard has starred in hit TV shows such as Parenthood and The Ranch and has shown his artistic aptitude stretches far outside the confines of comedy.
Whilst Shepard has enjoyed a fruitful career that has seen him go from strength to strength, this hasn’t meant that it’s all been plain sailing. The actor has been very open about the struggles he had with substance abuse, and although he’s sober now, for a long time, running concurrently to his work was the problem that had started in his late teens. Famously, he achieved sobriety in 2005, and since then, he’s only had one minor relapse, as he revealed in a September 2020 special episode of his podcast, Armchair Expert.
Today, he looks back on his period of substance abuse with more clarity than ever before, and there is one moment he’s been quick to clear up – his notorious 2004 appearance on Conan. The short interview was such a mess that it ended up getting him banned from the show until he cleaned up.
“Professionally, the only wreckage I really had while I was an addict was I went on Conan,” Shepard said when appearing on The Pursuit of Healthiness podcast. “I had done the pre-interview in a blackout, and I woke up to the hotel security shaking me awake, and I was with a stranger, and the stranger had peed the bed, or I had peed the bed — someone had peed the bed.”
The actor then explained that his publicist convinced the security guard to open the room because he was scheduled to be on the late-night talk show in under 20 minutes. “I show up on the show. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I can tell he’s queuing me up for stories I’ve told, but I don’t know any of the stories. So, I’m just doing what I can to be funny out there, and I am a mess,” he recalled.
Although the Idiocracy star maintained that he believes the audience “dug” the interview, it was a real struggle for the host, Conan O’Brien, to get through it as the rambling conversation that Shepard brought was at points incomprehensible. “So I was banned from that show for some years until I got sober, and I got myself back on it, and now I’ve been on it a bazillion times, but that was probably the only career wreckage-y thing I did,” Shepard concluded.
Despite the car crash interview, Shepard did bounce back, and he and Conan are on good terms. When appearing on a 2018 episode of Armchair Expert, O’Brien even revealed that the actor wasn’t his worst guest by any stretch of the imagination. He gave that honour to one of the most lauded filmmakers in America, Abel Ferrara.
He said: “Abel Ferrara. He fled during the show. Before his segment, he ran away, got on the elevator, and was out on the street running away when [segment producer Frank Smiley] gave chase. Frank caught him and led him back. He came on camera against his will”.
