Colbert postpones plans to film in New Zealand following terrorist attack
On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert Monday night, Colbert offered condolences to the people of New Zealand and spoke about a trip to film the show there this week that had been kept a secret until now.
Last September, New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern appeared on The Late Show and invited Colbert to New Zealand, where the J.R.R. Tolkien super-fan would be made an honorary citizen of Hobbiton, the movie set used in The Lord of the Rings andThe Hobbit movies. But following a terrorist attack by a white nationalist at two mosques in Christchurch that left 50 people dead, Colbert felt compelled to postpone the trip.
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“We didn’t ever tell anybody, we were gonna make it a surprise, but we were actually supposed to go down Wednesday. We were going to go down there for a week to shoot in New Zealand because it had been such a lovely invitation and I just love that country,” Colbert said. He later added, “Obviously we’re not going to go down now, but we hope to go down in the future. And again, we just want to say to everybody down there how sad, how heartbroken we are for what that country is going through.”
Colbert, who first traveled to New Zealand to make a cameo in 2013’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, also lamented the spread of white supremacy there.
“It’s this wonderful, isolated country so far away from the problems that we take for granted here north of the equator, and now this particular brand of evil has infected that country, like a ghost or something you wouldn’t imagine,” Colbert said. “Truly like an evil creature has arrived on that island.”
Following the attack, Ardern promised to strengthen gun laws, which are already much stricter than the laws in America, and Colbert hopes that New Zealand’s government is able to do what the American government has not.
“I pray with all my heart that they take the action down there,” Colbert said, “and have the courage to take action that we seem to lack up here in the United States.”
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The Late Show With Stephen Colbert airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. on CBS.
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