Interview segment isn’t first small-screen cameo for PM, who has also appeared on Canada’s Drag Race, and Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj
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No stranger to screen or stage, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will make a different kind of on-camera appearance Monday night when he appears as a guest on CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
According to his official itinerary, Trudeau will film an interview segment with the host while in New York for the 78th gathering of the United Nations General Assembly.
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Trudeau will appear alongside RuPaul Charles, creator and host of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the spinoff Canada’s Drag Race, a series on which Trudeau appeared in November 2022.
“Glad to be the first. Look forward to the time there’s a third or a fourth,” he said in 2022, upon being welcomed as the first world leader to show up on a Drag Race set.
He went on to speak about Canada championing diversity and its support for the LGBTQ2SI community, and concluded his visit by asking, “When do I get to meet RuPaul?”
“Hate to see you leave, love to watch you walk away, baby,” one contestant says gleefully to the PM as he departs following a heavily edited two-minute chat.
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Outside of scrums in front of Parliament or interviews with major news networks, the prime minister has shown up on the small screen a handful of times.
In September 2019 Trudeau and, to a lesser extent, Canada were featured in an episode of Netflix’s Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj. At one point during the light-hearted interview, Minhaj asks if Canada will end the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia, one of the largest non-United States export markets for defence equipment.
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“We take our legal responsibilities and the breaking of contracts very seriously in this country,” Trudeau responds.
The episode, titled The Two Sides of Canada, also has Trudeau defending oil and gas production — zeroing in on the Trans Mountain Pipeline — while also preaching the need to address climate change.
“We’re not going to be polluting more. We’re going to be putting a price on pollution and we are going to move forward in a way that a lot of people choose to make fun by saying ‘Oh, you can’t do both at the same time,’” Trudeau counters. “Canadians know you can protect the environment and grow the economy at the same time.”
A couple of weeks after that tête-à-tête, Trudeau was set to appear as a guest on A Little Late with Lilly Singh, a short-lived NBC talk show hosted by the Canadian entertainer born of YouTube fame. However, the pre-taped segment was quickly cut after Trudeau’s 2001 brownface scandal came to light the same day it was set to air.
The Patriot Act appearance wasn’t his first sit down with Minhaj. That came in a 2016 segment on the The Daily Show.
Their tongue-in-cheek chat was focused on Syrian refugees in Canada illegally crossing the border into the United States, a hot-button topic for some U.S. news networks at the time, but it also strayed into bathroom humour, Nickleback and Stanley’s Cup — a tinfoil knockoff of the trophy that has eluded Canadian teams since 1993.
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When Minhaj asked about the risk of immigrants becoming radicalized and the threat that might present to Canada, referencing the recent attacks in Paris and Belgium, Trudeau said: “The best counter to the radicalization and marginalization that we’ve seen in other parts of the world is to create an inclusive society where everyone, including and especially Muslim Canadians, have every opportunity to succeed, just like everybody else.”
In a lesser-known cameo, Trudeau, or at least his voice, showed up in Season 2 of Brent Butt’s animated Corner Gas series. In a brief scene in which Brent is helping his father, Oscar, start a digital edition of the local newspaper, the two concoct a story of agro-armageddon, “death in the dirt.”
“Now some online rag is saying I’m responsible for sea monsters on the Prairies. Sea monsters! I mean do people just make up whatever they want and call it news?” Trudeau asks in a scene set in a rustic Prime Minister’s office.
“Pretty much, yeah,” a voice says from off-screen.
“Unbelievable,” an exasperated Trudeau says. “What a time to be prime minister.”
The Colbert interview airs Monday night on Global at 11:35 p.m. EST.
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