Taylor Tomlinson Sela Shiloni A few days after Taylor Tomlinson accepted the job as host of CBS’ After Midnight, her health took a considerable dive. Initially, Tomlinson chalked it up to a cold – “an insane, fucked-up, demon cold, but still,” she writes in her new book, Actually, Nevermind, a collection of autobiographical essays.
One doctor loaded her up with steroids; another diagnosed her with mono. She kept going, filming Have it All, her third Netflix special; though watching it back now, all Tomlinson can see is how sick she was. A few months later, she would start her new gig, still wildly sick. “I wore a mask everywhere I could and still caught a sinus infection or chest cold or strep throat every two weeks,” she writes, “on top of what was now my constant, aching baseline fatigue.”
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In time, Tomlinson would have herself tested for mold, which was found in her blood; and though her health improved during season two, with the assist of roughly 30 twice-daily supplements, her immune system remained remarkably fragile. Tomlinson ultimately told her producers that she simply couldn’t do another season of the show. She did, however, present a list of comedians who could replace her, she writes in the book, though CBS opted to cancel the show instead.
With Actually, Nevermind now out, Tomlinson speaks candidly about her decision to quit the show, write the book and tackle her “worst nightmare” head on.
I’d like to hone in on the chapter about After Midnight. You write, “The truth is I took the job because I was lonely.” How aware were you of that fact at the time? And looking back, was it the right decision for you?
I think I did know but it’s impossible to say, right? I do remember when I was deciding whether or not to take the job, I was like, “It would be great to have a reason to be in L.A.”
You wanted some kind of community here?
Yeah, that was really something I wanted, and I definitely got as a result of taking that job. And I do think that that was probably my main motivator, and I think I was aware of it at the time. And it did anchor me to L.A. in a way that I just hadn’t [been]. Because if you can keep adding shows on the road, you’ll stay out there forever — and then you come home just to drive your car so the battery doesn’t die.
How honest did you feel you could be at the time about how unwell you were?
Well, I didn’t know what was going on. I really didn’t know, and I just kept thinking, “If I just keep pushing, I’m going to get better. It’s going to be fine.” And then for months and months and months, it didn’t get better. And it was one of those things where if you don’t have a life-threatening illness, you keep pushing. That’s showbiz, baby. I’m doing jazz hands.
Oh, I see them.
And also, everybody was meeting me for the first time, so everybody met me very sick. And it was tough because I was trying to make a good impression, and I was trying to do a good job in such an altered state and just trying to tell myself, “This will resolve itself.” Because that’s what you do. I’d been doing that on the road for years, where I just go, “Just push through this, and then it’ll be fine. You can crash for a few days.” But when you’re doing a late night show, there wasn’t enough time to crash and recover.
So, for the first five months of that show, I wasn’t doing stand-up. I wasn’t touring. I was just doing the show for three days, and then I would be in bed for four. And everyone who worked with me on set day-to-day was so lovely, and I wish I had said more about this in the book. We had three showrunners between seasons one and two, and they were really trying. They saw me every day, so they had the best understanding of where my health was at, and they were like, “Hey, what can we do? Do you want to do the table read from home? Do you want to sleep in? Maybe we can put your dressing room somewhere that is a little less crowded so you’re not worried about germs?” But also they were trying to run a whole show.
I know things moved relatively quickly once you told your producers you were going to quit, but when did you reach that decision internally?
It wasn’t a thing where I just woke up one day and was like, “Yeah, I’m done.” It was months of me thinking about it. I had this tour and I was like, “I don’t know if I’m going to make it through the tour.” And because I owed Netflix another special, I moved up the Netflix special, got through that, and then canceled the rest of my tour, which was so much time and so much money. That was another wave of disappointing people. And that one was super hard because I disappointed a lot of my fans, who had followed me on the road for a long time, and my personal team, who have known me for 10 years. I’m going back on tour now, but I took 10 months off, which is insane.
For you, yes.
But that show [After Midnight] was objectively a dream job, and it’s why I was so devastated that I left and the job disappeared. It was such a special group of people, and for someone to [be able to] go in and host four episodes three days a week in L.A.? What an amazing job for so many comedians, and there were so many who would’ve been amazing at it. So, it was hard for me, because I was like, “I am so unbelievably lucky to have these opportunities, and how can I not rise to the occasion?” But I’d been rising to the occasion for 10 years, and I just pushed it too hard for too long. And what happens when you push it too hard for too long to all the workaholics out there reading this is that when you try not to disappoint people for too long and you keep going, “Yeah, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it,” you end up disappointing people. You become your worst fear, which is a disappointment because you just cannot push any harder.
It’s almost inevitable.
Yeah, so last year was really tough for me. Really tough. But I was so grateful that I had the book to work on because if I took that much time off and didn’t have a special to edit and a book to write, I would have gone absolutely crazy. It was also interesting to be home for that amount of time and realize, “Oh, I’ve been running on adrenaline for a really long time and [now I’m] actually going to see doctors.” And I talk about this in the book, but to get really sick in my early 30s and not know what was going on — and I was not aware of this at the time, but I became aware of it after a lot of therapy — was [a lot because] my mom got sick when she was 32. She went to the doctor, and they said, “It’s hormones, you’re fine.” By the time they figured out it was cancer, it was too late. And maybe if someone had listened to her…
So then I have that in my brain when I’m going to all these doctors and they’re going, “Well, mono takes a long time.” “Oh, it might be long COVID.” “Oh, it’s an autoimmune thing.” All these different answers I’m getting, and there’s something in the back of your head going, “No, this is what’s going to kill me. I’m right where my mom was in her early 30s, and here it is. You were right when you were a kid and you were scared that you’re going to die at 34 too. It’s happening.” So, I was scared to keep pushing and make my health deteriorate further — and I was also scared to stop pushing and have to face all of that.
Once it was clear that the show was going away, you did your own internal apology tour, as you described it in the book. But there were parameters around what you could or should say. Talk to me about that, and why you stayed quiet.
When I quit, I wasn’t supposed to say that I wanted someone else to replace me. And I thought that was sort of confusing, but I said OK because I didn’t want to do anything wrong. And now I feel comfortable saying it, but a part of me was like, “Maybe I don’t even talk about this in the book.” But the decision to host a show like this was me changing my mind about something [the central theme of Actually, Nevermind]. It was not anything I ever thought I would do, and then to quit was also a big change-your-mind moment, and it was a huge turning point in my adult life. It was like, hey, the worst possible thing you could think of [happens, and] you disappoint all these people that you admire and respect. So, I didn’t feel like there was any way around talking about it in the book, but I didn’t want to talk about it any sooner than this because it’s such a nuanced situation and you can’t just give a sound bite about it.
So, I’ll go back to an earlier question: Do you regret taking the job when you did?
I’m so happy I took the job but also a different person took that job. I am a completely different person after being that sick for that long and that’s something I’m still kind of dealing with. When I see pictures, videos, whatever of me getting the job, I’m like, I don’t even know who that is. It wasn’t like I was sick and I took the job and went, “It’ll get better.” I took the job and then my body crashed and I thought it would get better and it didn’t. So, it depends on the day. There are certain days that I think, “Oh, you shouldn’t have even taken that job.” And I don’t think I would have if I was that sick. I think if they had offered it to me a month later and I’d been that sick for a month, I would’ve said, “No, I can’t rely on my immune system.” But at the time, I felt very capable and who I was then could have done it. And anytime I feel healthy now, I even think, “You could have done another [season], you should have pushed through.” So, it really just depends on the day and it’s hard not to dwell and beat yourself up but you just have to go, “I did what I did and I was in survival mode and I tried my best to handle it as gracefully as possible,” but also I know I made mistakes.
Talk to me about your decision to write the book. What drove it?
I mean, I wanted to write books before I wanted to do stand-up. When I was a kid, I wanted to write young adult fantasy novels. Then Bossy Pants [by Tina Fey] and Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? [by Mindy Kaling] came out when I was around 17, and those books were hugely inspirational. I was about a year into doing stand-up, and it was like, “Oh, I could do both at some point.” But I just felt, in my 20s, that I hadn’t experienced enough yet. And if I was going to do a book like that, I’d need some sort of loose theme to tie it together because I didn’t have the self-confidence to go, “Here’s just a book of everything I think right now.”
Then when I was 30 or 31, I thought of an idea and was ready to take some meetings to see if anyone was interested and luckily people were. Also, it was right around the time that I got dumped, so it was like, OK, you have this idea and now you have all this time that you were allotting for this relationship. I think it’s a workaholic’s reaction to take on another project when they’re failing in their personal life. I was also like, “I would love a job that I could do in bed. That’d be great.”
With this, much like with your stand-up, you’re mining your own life. What can you do with a book that you couldn’t do with stand-up?
Just be earnest. My stand-up is a very heightened version of me at different points in my life. But with a book, you can say everything. You don’t have to just pick the funniest angle or the silliest or hottest take. And you don’t have to worry as much about if there’s not a laugh every 20 seconds, people are going to check out. But it was definitely an adjustment to go from just being a joke machine for years, like, “Oh, you have to be getting as many punchlines out and saying things as quickly as possible in a very concise way,” to like, “No, expand on that. Tell us how you feel.”
I’ve heard you talk about how terrified you were about this book in past interviews, and I’m curious what was at the root of that fear?
The biggest thing I’m scared of, and I’m scared to even say it, is that people are going to be like, “She’s a terrible writer.” That’s what I’m most worried about. At this point, I know I’m good at stand-up. I have enough specials and enough years under my belt, but I’ve never written a book before, so I guess we’re all going to find out together if I suck.
So it was less about the content itself?
Yeah, people ask, like, “Are you scared of how much you shared?” And I am a little scared about that, but I get scared when I put out a comedy special, so that fear is familiar to me. There’s already a lot out there about me; you can find it.
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