[A new production of Samuel Beckett’s (1906-89) Absurdist masterpiece, Waiting for Godot (1953), opened on Broadway on 28 September, after starting previews at the Hudson Theatre on 13 September. Its limited run, directed by Jamie Lloyd, is scheduled to end on 4 January 2026.
[The production stars Keanu Reeves as Estragon in his Broadway début, and Alex Winter as Vladimir. The rest of the cast is made up of Brandon J. Dirden as Pozzo and Michael Patrick Thornton as Lucky, with Zaynn Arora (also making his Broadway début) and Eric Williams alternating as the Boy.
[The scenic and costume design are by Soutra Gilmour, the lighting design is by Jon Clark, and the sound design is by Ben and Max Ringham.
[After my posting of the transcript of a PBS News Hour segment, run last Saturday, 18 October, I’m now posting another transcript of an interview with Reeves and Winter, this one of Steven Colbert’s Late Show from last week.
[A few words about the transcription below: There was only one posted transcript, from the three YouTube videos of the interview. The dialogue, which was line-by-line—i.e., no paragraphing or other divisions—and in all caps. The lines were broken by seconds, with the time stamp for each second on a separate line of the transcript. It was also terribly inaccurate, with lots of mistranscriptions, missing words, misattributions of the speaker, and so on. (Several renderings of “Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves” came out “ALEX WINTER ENCOUNTER REEVES”!)
[To fix all these and other issues with the transcript, I had to go back and listen to the DVR I’d made of the show in a stop-rewind-and-go method to reconcile them with the recording. (It’s easier and more convenient to use my computer to type in the corrections while watching and listening to my TV than to try to shift back and forth between my word processor and the YouTube or CBS video on the Internet.)
[So, the result you will read below is a combination of the transcriber, almost certainly a machine with little human monitoring, and my own rendering of the conversation, plus my interpretation of the punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, and other typographical considerations. I’ve also added some bracketed explanatory and identifying insertions I thought would be helpful.]
“THE LATE SHOW
WITH STEPHEN COLBERT:
[This episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (CBS Broadcasting Inc., Paramount Skydance) aired on 13 October 2025 (Season 11, Episode 19). Reeves and Winter were Colbert’s only guests, aside from a musical performance at the end of the show by rapper J.I.D.]
Stephen Colbert: Hey! Hello, friends. Welcome back, everybody.
Ladies and gentlemen. My fellow Americans. My next guests tonight are currently co-starring in a new Broadway production of “Waiting for Godot.” You know them best as “Bill and Ted,” but please welcome back to “The Late Show,” Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves!
[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]
There you go. Nice to have you guys here. Thanks for making the trip up from the Hudson Theatre up here to the Ed Sullivan to join on a rare night off. ‘Cause you guys are doing eight shows a week, right?
Keanu Reeves [off-camera]: We are, yeah.
Colbert: For “Waiting for Godot” on Broadway.
[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]
Never done it, kinda jealous. Love the play. Let’s start with how some might be surprised that it’s pronounced GA-doh, instead of most people in America they think of guh-DOH. So, are you guys being fancy?
[Reeves and Winter LAUGH]
Colbert: Are we being fancy? Are you fancy [pointing to Winter] and are you schmancy [pointing to Reeves]?
Reeves: If that’s fancy and schmancy, what’s the other one?
Colbert: Guh-DOH?
Winter: Down-home? Heartland?
Colbert: Just down-home, American, heartland, existential dread.
Winter: There you go. Right.
Well, the play was written by an Irishman in French.
Colbert: Oh, there you go. There you go.
Winter: It was kind of almost mundane. There’s a lot of rhyming in the play, and GA-doh works better with the other names of the characters that are all Pozzo . . . Gogo [nickname of Estragon, Reeves’s character] . . . Godot. And he’s constantly confusing Godot for Pozzo. ‘I said Pozzo.’ ‘No, you said Godot.’ ‘No, you said Godot.’ It doesn’t work if ‘You said Pozzo.’ ‘No, you said Guh-DOH.’ What?
Colbert: You have been linked, obviously, in the public’s mind since the 1989 release . . . right there [showing photo] of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”
[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]
First of all, I understand you guys met in the audition process? Tell me about meeting each other for the first time.
Reeves: My recollection was there was a room . . .
Winter: . . . little room.
Reeves: You were sitting down. I walked in. Said “Hey, what’s up?” You said, “Hey, what’s up.”
Winter: Yeah. Motorcycle helmet and motorcycle helmet [pointing].
Reeves: We talked about motorcycles and . . .
Both: . . . bass guitars.
Reeves: We had stuff in common.
Winter: Yeah. And then it expanded into, like, literature and theater. And then it was, “Oh, he’s east coast and I’m east coast. We’d come from theater. There was a lot of similarities to our backgrounds, and we were two fish out of water actors in L.A. So . . . .
[Winter (b. 1965) did some Broadway shows early in his career. He made his Broadway début as a replacement for Louis Leonowens, the son of Anna Leonowens, in a 1977 revival of the musical The King and I, when he was 13, and played John Darling, the middle Darling child in a 1979 revival of the musical version of Peter Pan, when he was 14. He also appeared at the Manhattan Theatre Club in the American premiere of Simon Gray's (1936-2008) Close of Play in 1981.
[Reeves’s (b. 1964) U.S. stage début is his role in Godot. His previous stage experience has been in Canada, which he claims as his home country (he’s a Canadian citizen, though born in Beirut, Lebanon, and spending some years in Sydney, Australia, before moving to Toronto). Among other roles, he played Hamlet in Shakespeare’s classic masterpiece in a production at a Canadian regional theater in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1995. On 12 April 1989, Reeves appeared in his only other U.S. theater role, the part of Kip in a telefilm adaptation of Richard Greenberg’s (1958-2025) 1985 one-act play Life Under Water on the Public Broadcasting Service’s American Playhouse series.]
Reeves: Yeah.
Colbert: Wow.
[CROSSTALK]
Colbert: How long had you each been in L.A. at that point? It can be lonely if you . . . .
Reeves: I was there like five . . . four . . . three . . . four years before.
Winter: Two years . . . a couple years before I come out.
Reeves: And then we got to act together. And that’s where, like, that thing happened [snapping his fingers].
Winter: It’s sort of like being in a band. You know, there’s that rhythm section. The comedy is, being who we are, we were both playing the same instrument, which isn’t how a rhythm section is supposed to work.
Colbert: Four hands on one bass . . . .
Winter: We would literally leave set and go to one of each other’s apartments with our mini amps and jam, both playing bass . . .
[LAUGHTER]
Winter: . . . for hours and hours and hours.
Colbert: How did the neighbors feel about that?
Winter: I mean, they thought we were out of our minds. But, it is kind of nuts in retrospect.
Colbert: Talking about “Waiting for Godot” – Keanu, I understand you first had the idea of doing this?
Reeves: Yeah, about three and a half years ago, I was in London, working. I had jet lag. I was in a fugue state. And, the muses kind of sang down from above and said: “Waiting for Godot” with Alex. And I went, UH! and I Facetimed you . . .
Winter: You did, yeah.
Reeves: . . . and proposed.
Winter: You did, yeah. I opened up the Facetime and this is what you always do because you always Facetime. And I’m not a Facetimer. And I’m like, ‘Oh, God, I’ve got to put on a shirt.’
Colbert: It’s not chest time. It’s just Facetime.
Winter: It’s a camera in your face.
Colbert: Oh, I understand. Yeah.
Winter: So, I open it and there is Reeves, his face jammed into this webcam: “You, me, “Godot.” I don’t know what it says that I knew what he meant by that, but I thought it was a great idea. We’d both been looking for something to do together that wasn’t Bill and Ted. We both love theater. We wanted to go back and do theater. I love Beckett. I knew what it entailed though—it was going to be a monster.
Colbert: It is! It’s a lot to bite off. You could’ve started with “The Odd Couple” [popular Niel Simon comedy, 1965 (Broadway), 1968 (film), 1970-75 (television)] and worked your way up.
Both: Yeah!
Winter: Every time someone suggests an alternative, he’s like, yeah, we shoulda done that.
Reeves: Yeah!
Colbert: We have to take a quick break. We’ll be right back with more Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, everybody.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Colbert: Everybody, we are back with the stars of “Waiting for Godot” at the Hudson Theatre here in New York, Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves. It’s one of the most famous plays of the 20th century. It’s performed all the time. It’s often misinterpreted. People don’t know that while it’s a tragedy, is a tragicomedy, very funny.
[There are a number of Godot-related posts on Rick On Theater (and a few more on other Beckett plays), but one that applies to Colbert’s remark above is “History of Waiting For Godot” (30 March 2009). I will append a list of all the Godot posts at the bottom of this transcript.]
Reeves: It is, yeah.
Colbert: Take a stab, one of you, and explain to the audience, if you don’t mind, what it’s about.
Reeves: It can’t just be one thing.
Colbert: Okay. We’ve got all the time in the world.
Winter: Settle in.
Reeves: If “Hamlet” is “To be or not to be, that is the question,” Beckett in “Waiting for Godot” says, ‘That is not the question.’ ‘What are we doing here,’ that is the question.
[APPLAUSE]
Reeves: And it starts to, in a broad sense . . . it talks about our relationship to a personal god. And it’s like, ‘Can we be seen?’ ‘Will we be judged?’ Really, ‘Will he save us, punish us, will we be seen?’ In a broad sense.
And then there is friendship, codependence, yearning, waiting. What are we waiting for? What can we do? [nb: The French (i.e., “original”) title of the play is En attendant Godot, which means “While waiting for Godot.”] How do we relate to each other? There’s elements of power dynamics with the character [sic] Pozzo and Lucky.
Winter: Yeah, there’s brutality, characters can become both brutal and loving. You end up playing all of life in the course of two hours, which is . . . it’s kind of a trip to be honest with you, it is so beautifully written.
Reeves: Yeah, and about time, the collapsing of time, the human experience in the blink of an eye. I was born . . . in one day I can be born, one day I will die, one day I will be deaf, one day . . . . The circumstances of our life and how we relate to it.
Winter: We did talk about the fact that we’re both doing it in our . . . we were both going to turn 60 around the time we hit the stage and it is a play about reflection, about life and mortality and where are and what does it mean and what have you done and where are you going. [When the production started previews, Winter was 60 and Reeves had just turned 61.] And to be in that every night, and to say those words but to do that with a very close friend is pretty extraordinary.
Colbert: The design of it, it’s an unusual and very beautiful design. [Shows a photo of the Godot set, a long horn-like tube that creates a sense of forced perspective, sculpted of blonde wood and running from upstage to down, seemingly suspended in the air.]
Reeves: Aah! That’s our set.
Winter: Isn’t that cool?
Colbert: People see a lot of things in the set. You kept a list of the various things.
Winter: He is keeping – present tense – because it’s growing every day.
Colbert: I’m just curious, what . . . .
Reeves: We have the eye, the tunnel, the vortex, the sub-woofer, the habitrail, the lens.
[I’ve never found an explanation for the suggestion of the habitrail as a name for the central structure of the Godot set, so I looked it up to see what variant meanings it might have. The one that seems most fitting to me—and this is only my own view—is from the pinball machine. The wire ramps or tubes that guide the ball back to the player are sometimes called “habitrails.” The ball is sent on a meandering journey, buffeted by the flippers (and sometimes also the jostling of the machine), but always ends up in a tube that brings it back where it started. That sounds to me like the endless journey that Didi and Gogo are on. (If anyone has a better idea, please post it in the Comments section below.)]
Winter: The lens, the sewer, the habitrail.
Reeves: Circuits of time.
Winter: The circuits of time did come up at one point.
Reeves: We have the cross section of a tree. We recently got the shell.
Winter: The conch shell, which I think is a very beautiful one . . . .
Colbert: The sphincter.
Winter: That’s not incorrect. Yeah, yeah. I like that.
Reeves: The gun barrel from the Bond opening. [That’s what it reminded me of right away – but it doesn’t really fit Godot.]
Colbert: That’s cool. To me, it does look like an eye. Because the iris is little lower, right here, looks like the eye’s looking down so it looks like the universe or God as a providence, that sort of thing. It looms, that’s for sure. It could also be a moon being eclipsed by something small.
Winter: Yeah.
Colbert: Yeah. Your life or something like that.
Winter: Yeah. It does happen. You’ll see there is an actual – not to spoil – but there’s an actual sun that drops . . . or moon that drops down into that back space.
Colbert: So I was right?
Winter: You are correct. You are literally correct.
Colbert: I was pretty sure. I’m usually right.
[LAUGHTER]
Colbert: Alex, you made your Broadway debut at how old?
Winter: 13. “The King and I” with Yul Brynner [1977].
Colbert [to Reeves]: Is this your Broadway debut?
Reeves: Yes, it is.
[APPLAUSE]
Let’s talk for both of you, that sense of the butterflies before – not just opening night, but walking out on stage every night.
Reeves: Butterflies? Is that like terror butterflies?
Winter: I think it’s a polite way of saying you want to throw up.
Reeves: Right.
Colbert: Do you get that? Do you get that every night?
Reeves: Every night? Yes.
Colbert: What do you do? You have any particular rituals? People have – I slap myself in the face really hard twice before , , , . I do. Once, at the same time. I don’t want to do it right now, but I slap myself twice and I know I’ve done it hard enough if I regret having done it. Because, I’m awake and I’m leaving everything else backstage, and I just come on stage.
Winter: I have prayers that I always do . . .
Colbert: Oh, really . . . .
Winter: . . . before each act. I don’t take the risk of only just praying for the get through the play [sic], it’s a very hard play.
Colbert: Oh, one act at a time . . . .
Winter: So, each act of the play gets a prayer.
[To Reeves] You have a position that you take backstage that’s interesting. You’re sort of seeded for Estragon. Like I come out of my dressing room and I see you there in sort of a state, and I’m like, ‘Oh, he’s like seeding Estragon.’
Reeves: That’s true, yes.
Winter: That’s part of it.
Reeves: I sort of sit in the thing [takes a position in his seat, facing front with his arms folded in his lap].
Winter: That is what he’s doing. That is very Estragon.
Colbert: Totally.
We are going to take another break here but we’ll be right back with more Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, everybody.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Colbert: Hey, everybody. We are back with the stars of “Waiting for Godot” here in New York at the Hudson Theatre, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter.
You both have new films. Alex, you have a movie directed, “Adulthood.” What’s “Adulthood”?
Winter: It’s a black comedy with Josh Gad and Kaya Scodelario, Billie Lourd, Anthony Carrigan [released 23 September]. It’s a wonderful cast. It’s an ensemble film about the impossibility of adulthood in our current society.
[APPLAUSE]
Colbert: [Inaudible] . . . social media keeps us . . . .
Winter: It’s hard . . . it’s hard out there for adults.
Colbert: Keanu, you have “Good Fortune” which opens on Friday [17 October].
[APPLAUSE]
Colbert: Is it true that after everything you’ve done, after all the “John Wicks” and all the “Matrices,” that this is the film that got you injured?
Reeves: Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
Colbert: If you don’t mind sharing . . . .
Reeves: I mean, comedy’s hard, right?
[Winter LAUGHS]
Colbert: Sure. Death is easy, comedy’s hard.
[The saying “Dying is easy, comedy is hard”—Colbert is paraphrasing the now-famous line—is attributed to British actor Edmund Gwenn (1877-1959) on his deathbed. The line has since been widely circulated and credited to other actors, but Gwenn is the most commonly cited source.]
Reeves: I fractured my patella.
Colbert: Your kneecap.
Reeves: My kneecap. I had a vertical break like a potato chip.
Colbert: I’m sorry, like a what?
Reeves: Like a potato chip.
Colbert: Did you hear it happen?
Reeves: I did not hear it pop because of the scream.
[Winter LAUGHS; Colbert GROANS]
Colbert: How? What were you doing? Pratfall or something?
Reeves: Okay – uhhh. I was doing a scene . . . we were doing a cold-water plunge with [writer, director, and cast member] Aziz Ansari and [cast member] Seth Rogen. And then, I was going back to the dressing room, they had a carpet – covering the carpet, there was a little thing and I caught my foot. I had a towel and I was cold and I was shuffling in my little ding-ding [sic]. And I caught my foot, and then I was like, whoa! And then I spiked and landed right on my knee.
[GROANS from audience, Winter, and Colbert]
Reeves: And then pain ensued.
Colbert: Potato chip.
Reeves: Yeah. Then it did that, then I couldn’t walk. But then I went to the hospital and they drained the blood.
Winter: And then you being you, you just kept shooting.
Reeves: I kept going.
But yeah, it made a lot of people laugh.
[LAUGHTER]
Colbert: That you potato-chipped your patella?
Reeves: They just said like, “You’re John Wick, and you just . . . .” I can’t swear, right?
Colbert: We can always bleep it.
Reeves: [BLEEP] broke your [BLEEP] [BLEEP].
Colbert: Sadly . . .
Reeves: The director’s like what? Aziz is like what? I can’t film because you broke your [BLEEP] kneecap. Sorry.
Colbert: We sadly lost, as I showed the interview before [in the Late Show’s segment before the Reeves-Winter interview], the great Diane Keaton [1946-2025; she died on 11 October at 79].
Keanu, people loved you two together in 2003, “Something’s Gotta Give.” Do you have a memory you can share of Diane Keaton in shooting this with her before we go?
Reeves: You know [to Colbert], and you know, too [to Winter]. We all know what an extraordinary, unique, special person and artist Diane is, was, and is. It was cool for me. I got to shoot the scene. Nancy Meyers directed. But it was Diane and Jack Nicholson at a table in a restaurant in Paris. And just watching those two legends, not only act, but insult each other.
[LAUGHTER]
You got a taste of it, I saw the clip that you shared. [An “attempted” interview on 30 April 2012 from The Colbert Report on Comedy Central.] She was almost like the same thing that she did to you, which was just like, she would turn to Jack, ‘You’re just a . . . you are a blah, blah, blah.’ And he’d be like, ‘You dirty, rotten . . . .’ They’re just grinning and they are insulting each other with love.
Winter: It sounds like our play.
Reeves: Yeah. The intelligence, the humor. But just watching them just be themselves and with the history and art that they worked.
Colbert: Alex, Keanu, thanks so much for being here. “Waiting
for Godot” is currently at the Hudson
Theatre. Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, everybody.
[The Godot post I cross-references above is a brief development and production history of the play. Allow me to say a few words here that may reiterate what I wrote in 2009 on that post. (Then I’ll list all the posts on ROT that pertain to Waiting for Godot.)
[First, let me pick up something Alex Winter mentions above: Samuel Beckett was an Irish writer who wrote often in French. After studying modern languages at Trinity College Dublin, he took up a teaching position in Paris. There, he was introduced to the Irish writer James Joyce, with whom he worked for years as a sort of assistant-cum-secretary.
[Beckett remained in Paris until 1930, when he went back to Dublin as a lecturer at Trinity College. He stayed only until the end of 1931. He traveled through Europe, writing essays, reviews, and novels, some of which were published and some were not. As he did all this career, he wrote in both French and Englis—often in French first.
[After another short visit to Ireland in 1937, he returned to France to settle permanently in Paris in 1939, despite the start of World War II. Though he made trips to England and Ireland, Beckett never lived there again. When Germany invaded France and occupied the country in 1940, he joined the Résistance, and eventually had to flee Paris for a small town in the south, where he remained for the rest of the war.
[Beckett never stopped writing throughout the war and even his refuge and resistance efforts in the south. He wrote Godot in French between October 1948 and January 1949. (As I note above, the French version of the play is entitled En attendant Godot.) After 1947, he wrote most of his works in French first.
[The point want to stress here is that Beckett didn’t just write Godot and his other works in French and then translate them into English. He rewrote then in English. The variation in the titles of En attendant Godot and Waiting for Godot isn’t the only difference between the to versions of the play. Throughout the texts, there are differences—some small and subtle, some more prominent and significant.
[The play’s titles can be a hint. Waiting for Godot is a play about ‘waiting.’ But waiting is a static action. When most people wait, they sit and read—the waiting rooms of offices everywhere are full of old magazines for people to read! Maybe the waiters people-watch. Still not active. Today, with portable computers and internet-connected cell phones, maybe they work or play. Not active.
[But En attendant Godot, as I noted above, means “while waiting for Godot.” It’s about what Didi and Gogo do while they wait. And remembering that the two characters are clowns—tramp clowns in the mold of Chaplin’s Little Tramp or Emmet Kelley’s Sad Willie—what wild activity would ensue . . . and does! (Beckett loved music hall and clowns. He was taken with the Marx Brothers and his 1965 movie Film starred Buster Keaton, the great silent-movie pantomimist.)
[And
now, that list:
[And two that might be of less interest, performance reports on two productions:
[Don’t forget the post on
18 October, the News
Hour transcript of the segment with Reeves and Winter of 10
October.]
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