‘The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon Wasn’t Prepared For People Disliking Him: “Some People Want You To Fail”
Jimmy Fallon hosts The Tonight Show and rose to fame after starring in Saturday Night Live.
In a new interview, Fallon revealed that he did not anticipate people disliking him after he became famous.
“It’s the worst,” the late-night talk show host said on The Diary of a CEO podcast. “Yes, it is the absolute worst. I hate it. I want everyone to like me. I can’t stand it. I go, ‘Oh, my gosh. What can I do to make you like me?’ I think the answer is you can’t. You can’t make everyone like you. You just have to do what you do. And do the best that you can at what you do. And be happy with yourself.”
Fallon also discussed “getting rejection” and “getting your sketches cut. Being told you’re not funny.”
The comedian came up before the prominence of social media, where every move gets dissected and shredded into pieces.
“You think that it’s just going to be, ‘Oh, this is cool. Everyone will be great.’ But then not everyone’s rooting for you,” he said. “Some people want you to fail. People’s jobs are to take me down and to put bad press out and stuff. That’s their job, and you’re just like, ‘Ooh.’ I don’t live in that world. I don’t believe that it’s real, but it kind of is real and you go, ‘Oh, people are just kind of being mean.’”
Fallon noted that his way of tackling negativity is to “toughen up and get through it and just keep your head down and keep being funny” and “just keep doing things and keep being creative.”
“If you move that out, you realize it’s not even real. It’s real, but it’s noise and it doesn’t affect you,” he continued. “You can only believe in yourself and know that you have to keep going and, if you keep scoring, that will show. Your work will show. That stuff I wasn’t prepared for, of overcoming that. Overcoming hating on you or saying you’re not good or something. You don’t think that’s going to happen. But it will if you’re successful, because someone’s not going to like you, no matter what.”
