Frankenstein’s Monster Steps Into the Spotlight as Brian Stack Faces Colbert’s Infamous Questionert.NH
Stephen Colbert had only one guest Thursday night—Anthony Hopkins—but The Late Show also cooked up a special treat for fans of Mary Shelley and/or Conan O’Brien, posting a web-exclusive edition of The Colbert Questionert featuring none other than Frankenstein’s Monster.
Playing the monster was a staffer who’s no stranger to the facepaint: Brian Stack, who portrayed the same character for years on Conan O’Brien’s late-night shows. Stack’s version of the Monster turned up in a range of sketches, most famously in the recurring segment “Frankenstein Wastes a Minute of Our Time,” where the grunting Monster would lumber onstage, eager to show O’Brien something he’d discovered in the halls of 30 Rock, motioning for the camera to follow him—only for it to turn out to be disappointingly mundane, like a pipe or a sneaker. (He memorably once pushed aside Tom Hanks to show off a light switch.)
On Colbert’s Halloween-themed segment, the Monster proved more articulate than ever, answering Colbert’s standard questionnaire with dry precision. Asked about his favorite sandwich, he replied, “probably a BLT—pretty basic, but toasted is good.” His scariest animal? “A shark with a crossbow.” Oranges, he explained, “give me stomach acid, and it’s hard to find Tums in nineteenth-century Germany.” When asked to pick between cats or dogs, he went with dogs: “If you look like this, you need unconditional love.”
He even weighed in on music and mortality, citing Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls as lifelong favorites, and answering Colbert’s “What happens when we die?” with a matter-of-fact, “We’re jolted back to life by a mad scientist.”
Stack, who wrote for O’Brien on Late Night, The Tonight Show, and Conan from 1997–2011, has been on The Late Show staff since Colbert’s first episode in 2015.
