My Strange Obsession
I watched every episode of The Colbert Questionert to find out what celebrities think happens when we die
What happens when we die, Keanu Reeves?
The year was 2019. Keanu Reeves was visiting The Last Show with Stephen Colbert to promote John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum. It was the end of the interview, and Reeves had just finished explaining the plot of the (then) upcoming film Bill & Ted Face the Music, in which Bill and Ted would need to write a song in 80 minutes to save the world:
Colbert: So what happens to you, if you don’t do this?
Reeves: Well, it’s the end of the universe, the end of time and space continuum, it’s all over.
Colbert: Oh wow, so you’re facing your own mortality and the mortality of all existence?
Reeves: Yeah.
Colbert: Wow.
Colbert takes a pause as Reeves amusedly nods his head, then delivers an instantly-iconic question: “What do you think happens when we die, Keanu Reeves?” Caught off guard, the audience laughs, while Reeves takes a deep breath before offering a response so unexpectedly moving that it has been engrained on my brain ever since:
“I know that the ones who love us will miss us.”
Soon, The Late Show had turned the moment into a full segment called The Colbert Questionert, in which Colbert asks mega-stars the same 15 questions in a row. The questions, designed to plumb the true depths of the human spirit, consist of hard-hitters such as, “What is the best sandwich,” and “What is your favourite action movie?” Or, most importantly, “What do you think happens when we die?”
I recently saw Prince Harry’s Colbert Questionnert floating around social media, which led me down an immediate rabbit hole of watching every single CQ episode online so that I could see how each celebrity responded to the question of death and the afterlife. The responses vary, from noncommittal I don’t know’s to Mariah Carey quoting The New Testament. Because I have normal interests and a normal amount of time on my hands, I spent an evening compiling each celebrity’s response. Without further ado…
Every celebrity response to the question, “what do you think happens we die?”
Bradley Cooper: “Oh man, you tell me.”
Sandra Bullock: “Other than…decomposition? I think…our energy stays around the ones we love.”
Cate Blanchett: “You turn into a soup, a human soup.”
John Krasinski: “I hope it’s great. I think there’s definitely something waiting for us.”
George Clooney: “I don’t know…as I get older, I start renegotiating things a little bit. You start thinking, ‘maybe there’s something.’”
John Oliver: “I’m hoping for just some sense of peace. I don’t have religion in the way that you have it, so I’m just hoping for the end of life to be kind of the feeling you get when you sink into a chair after a long day.”
Seth Rogen: “I hope—something we don’t understand, would be great, that’s what I’m hoping for.”
Jane Fonda: “I think that you remain energetically with the people that loved you, which is why it’s so important to love and be loved; if people love you, you remain in their memory energetically.”
Jon Stewart: “Uh, very little.”
Ethan Hawke: “I don’t think we die. I don’t think that we have an understanding of the divine concept of time. I don’t think we’re any more capable of understanding a clock than a dog is. I think something much bigger is going on than we’re aware of in our day-to-day routines, so I don’t think I have the intelligence or the DNA makeup to answer that question.”
Meryl Streep1: “I think we see everyone we love, and we then go back and influence the lives of everyone we’ve left behind.”
Michelle Obama: “We go to heaven. Or, I do.”
Emily Blunt: “I think we go somewhere more beautiful—that’s what I tell myself. I hope…I want that.”
Elvis Costello: “We go into everything.”
Mariah Carey: “What do YOU think happens? ‘The assured expectation of things hoped for, the evidence of things yet unseen. Hebrews 11.’”
Bono: “We’re born, I actually believe that’s when we’re born. That’s when we begin. Can i stick with that?”
James Taylor: “Well, I think we should rot.”
Robert De Niro2: “well, one thing is it’s harder to get a job.”
Jon Batiste: “Well, I think no one ever really dies. I think our body passes away, and our soul meets the creator of all things, and what we’ve done, the love we’ve given in this life, all the things that we’ve done, that lives on forever, so that’s why it’s important what we do here, right now, because once you go to the next realm, it’ll still be here for the next generation.”
Josh Brolin, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeff Goldblum, Neil Degrasse Tyson: answers not included, for unknown reasons.
Shaquille O’Neal: “Nobody knows.”
Daniel Craig3: “Nothing, we become stars.”
Martha Stewart4: “We go to heaven.” “Everyone?” Colbert asks. “Only nice people,” she clarifies.
Sting: “Oh, it’s only conjecture, but I imagine it’s the same as it was before I was here. Which makes it incumbent on us to create a heaven on earth now, and not hell.”
Bruce Springsteen: “Okay, individual consciousness? Adios. But our souls and our spirits will live on with the people that we’ve loved and that loved us. I’m going with that.”
Ringo Starr: “I think we go to heaven. Heaven’s great, but you don’t stay there too long, you just gotta get yourself together again and come down and deal with all that *bleep* you didn’t deal with last time you were here.”
Billy Crystal: “We go into syndication.”
Tiffany Haddish: “I think that your body disintegrates and goes away and I think your soul goes and has a meeting to decide if you should come back or not. That’s what I want to think happens. And then, everybody fights over your belongings.”
Prince Harry5: “I think we become animals.”
Tom Hanks: “I think we get to race automobiles.”
In case you were keeping track, that’s four after-life predictions that didn’t make the final Colbert cut (release the tapes!), one Bible verse, and one (1) Bradley Cooper becoming too overwhelmed to remember his answers about the afterlife (or apps).6 I’m curious, do celebrities not rehearse their lines ahead of time for these interviews?? You already know what the questions will be!
The only autograph Meryl Streep has ever asked for is Richard Nixon’s.
The scariest animal, per Robert De Niro, is “Republicans.”
Daniel Craig is one of the few celebrity respondents to the Questionert to elicit an audible “awww” from the audience (other than Keanu himself).
Martha Stewart’s favourite action is Dr. Strangelove.
Prince Harry would like to come back as an elephant.
Bradley Cooper was unable to name the most used-app on his phone without panicking and finally responding with…the weather app.
I loved this! I think my favorite answer was Ethan hawkes lol
Thumbs up to Sandy and Jane