Conan O'Brien has revealed he didn't have a good experience after Lisa Kudrow approached him to be on her show.
Actor, writer and director Rashida Jones sat down with O'Brien for Monday's episode of the Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast. At one point they discussed tracing their family genealogy and the show Who Do You Think You Are? of which Lisa Kudrow is one of the executive producers. The show sees celebrities trace their family tree with the help of historians and experts.
While Jones—daughter of actor and model Peggy Lipton and record producer Quincy Jones—said she had a "super intense" experience, for O'Brien, it was the complete opposite.
Newsweek emailed spokespeople for O'Brien, Jones and Kudrow for comment on Thursday.
"Just before we went on mic I was mentioning a good friend of mine for a long time, Lisa Kudrow, and I was told you did her show, which is Who Do You Think You Are? I did it and um, had not a great experience. Not anyone's fault," O'Brien said.
Jones sounded shocked and when she asked the comedian why, he explained: "Well because, Lisa's show that she executive produces, they, they, they take people of note and find out their lineage and so they—Lisa said, 'Oh we're going to find out so much fascinating stuff about your lineage and who you are' and I said 'I don't think so, I just don't think so, we were just people that stole horses in Ireland' and Lisa was like 'Don't be ridiculous, you're being crazy, no no no, look at you, self-deprecating Conan. No no no.'
"So, ugh, they took my saliva and they ran it through the machines and I heard nothing for like six months, to the point where I called Lisa, and she—"
Jones quipped: "Insecure about your DNA, that's amazing."
O'Brien joked that they found out he had been linked to nine crimes before continuing: "No, no, I'm kidding. No, she said, 'Yeahhh, ah, there's nothing.' And I said, 'Nothing? I mean, no great great great great great great grandnephew of Charlemagne?' You know how everyone's kind of related to Napoleon or somebody? No, I'm related to no one. They went back about, I think, nine generations, and then I was just related to rocks."
As people laughed, Jones said: "That is interesting though," before O'Brien added: "Not even Stone Henge though, and not good rocks, rocks that have propped up an outhouse."
To help cheer O'Brien up, Jones theorized that the reason they didn't find anything was: "Maybe that's because you really are a one of a kind.
"You should feel better about yourself because you're—you stand on your own. That's like, the ultimate anti-nepo baby find, like you're the only reason you're here," she said.
O'Brien joked about willing himself into existence and being born from two rocks before Jones gave him the rundown of her own experience.
She said they started in New York, then went to Ireland before ending up in Latvia, which is where her mother's side of the family is from.
"My dad is obsessed with genealogy and he's done so much research on his own for decades so we actually know a lot about our family history on my dad's side," she explained. "It's pretty wild because it's like, a mix of kind of a lot of different things. As we have, kind of on our enslaved side we have some like stuff with owners and they had babies so we have a lot of royalty and American presidents in our lineage from that side and so they tried to follow my dad's path a little bit.
"[They] hit a dead end with one man named Henry Dickson, who arrived on the shores somewhere in the South and then they started to track my mum's side and it took a year, it took a really long time."
Jones said they traced her family to a small town in Latvia, which she visited, and she learned they destroyed the town during the war and "killed everybody."
"My entire family was just, like, it's so dark, but just literally lined up in a pit with 40,000 other Jews and Riga and just shot, one by one by one. Everybody. So like, the only line left in my family is my great great great grandfather and all of his kids," she told O'Brien.
"It was shocking, my mum came with me, which was kind of amazing, and it was the first time in my life that I was like, 'Oh I have to have a kid.' It made me want to have a kid because I felt some huge imperative, some responsibility being like Black and Jewish.
"There are so many reasons for me to not be here and I'm here and it felt like I had to continue that lineage, I felt, like a strong pull from the ancestors."
In August 2018, Jones had a son with musician Ezra Koenig.
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