Following yesterday’s announcement that Ricky Gervais would be hosting this year’s Golden Globe Awards, we had two big questions. First, would any celebrities actually be willing to show up and risk being a target of his opening monologue? And perhaps more importantly, what happened to his promise never to host the show again in the wake of all the controversy and backlash it caused last year? While today doesn’t deliver the answer to either of these questions, it does bring us a new blog post from Gervais that provides some interesting insight into why he decided to host the show for a third, and “definitely final” time.
“It was a tough decision to be honest,” he writes. “There were many pros and cons. I loved doing it, but I was worried that I couldn’t improve on last year. I’m in LA anyway as I’m launching Life’s Too Short on HBO. But then I didn’t want the Globes to overshadow the series. I knew some people would be uncomfortable with me being host. (This was a pro by the way.)”
So what finally make him come around? As he explains, “the fact that it would shut up all those f*cking idiots who said that I’d never be invited back.” Given that Gervais is entering into his hosting duties knowing that he doesn’t plan to return, if we were the Hollywood Foreign Press Association — or say, Ashton Kutcher — we’d be pretty nervous about him deciding to go out with a bang. [via Vulture]