‘Elsbeth’: Showrunner Jonathan Tolins on How Stephen Colbert’s Guest Appearance Came Together (Exclusive)

Stephen Colbert is guest starring in Sunday’s Season 3 premiere of Elsbeth, and showrunner Jonathan Tolins told PopCulture.com how it happened.

The Late Show host’s appearance will be a pretty meta one, as he’s playing a late-night talk show host who has problems with his head writer (Amy Sedaris) and her on-air sidekick husband (Andy Richter).

The appearance has apparently been long in the works, as Tolins recalled how Elsbeth star Wendell Pierce was on The Late Show about a year ago, “and Stephen started joking with him about how he wanted to be on Elsbeth, he wanted to play a corpse on a CBS procedural and I think someone from the CBS press office was there and texted that to Amy Reisenbach, who’s the head of CBS, and she immediately wrote to me, ‘We have to make this happen.’”

“I was hoping I could get him to have a huge part, but, you know, the schedule, we had to figure out exactly how much time we could have him and what he’d be willing to do and all that,” he continued. “So I knew part of why I thought it would be fun to have him play a late-night TV host and sort of play it, that the audience knows about him anyway. And we broke the story, I guess, over the summer. I kept calling our executives to say, ‘Are you sure he’s gonna do this?’ They said,‘Oh, yes. Absolutely. I think so.’ I can never get a really straight answer. Like, what have they read?”

Tolins went on to explain that they “went ahead” and wrote the script, which he finished on July 3. “And finally, I seemed to get an answer that he was definitely in, and we read it. And then everything that happened with the show happened,” referencing The Late Show’s cancellation, which was announced on July 17.

He revealed that he “was afraid that would mean we would lose him, because he was shooting with us, like, a week and a half later. But to his credit and to our delight, he still did the show. And I figured he would, because at that point, we had casted Amy Sedaris, who is one of his old friends, opposite him.”

“It was surreal, first of all, because in that moment, Stephen was kind of the most famous person in the world, almost, in terms of everything that was going on,” Tolins explained. “Everyone was thinking about it and arguing about it.”

Additionally, Tolins made it a point to say that he “did nothing to the script to comment on what was actually happening in the real world. Everything in it was there already, and I like the fact that it’s not trying to make hay of the news. But there are some crazy resonances or some things in the episode that were just sort of lucky timing.”

“But anyway, he was just a total pro and so warm and funny, and he was everything I hoped,” he said. “I mean, I’ve gotten to work with a lot of my heroes on this show and to bring in people I’ve admired forever, but I will say the day with Colbert was a very special day for me.”

Fans will be able to catch Stephen Colbert on a very special Season 3 premiere of Elsbeth this Sunday at 9:30 p.m. ET on CBS, streaming the next day on Paramount+. The show will go back to its regular time slot starting Thursday, Oct. 16 at 10 p.m. ET.