During Season 1 of the pandemic, one of the few pleasures we had inside our homes was getting our weekly dose of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. The late-night news satire show is known for tackling serious issues but also inserting really weird jokes that make the audience go “how the heck did we get from politics to parachuting teddy bears?” In the seventh season, one of the recurring jokes was John Oliver’s violent infatuation with Academy Award Nominee Adam Driver (Marriage Story), which started off small but eventually built up to Driver himself making a cameo on the show just to tell Oliver off.

In a recent interview with Collider's Steven Weintraub, Oliver revealed that he and the writer’s team also had no idea how far that joke would extend since it was first featured in the season as a throwaway line. However, the audience responded well to Oliver’s mix of attraction and violence towards Driver, and they decided to keep coming back to it until they reached out to the actor and decided to take it all the way to the season finale.

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Image via HBO Max

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During the interview, Weintraub asked Oliver if knew early in the season that Driver would be on, or if it was a one-off joke. Oliver explained how the joke came to be, evolved, and how Driver ultimately was pivotal in making it last:

"No, that was a one-off joke. That was one of the final shows that we actually had in the studio before the pandemic kicked in. I just liked it because it was a really funny joke. The audience seemed to like it a little bit and be very uncomfortable as well. And it was the perfect synthesis of those two reactions. So then we did it again and then again and it felt like a really fun joke format. Then we were about to stop because it felt like, well, unless this joke is heading somewhere to your point, it probably should end.

That was when we reached out to Adam Driver to say, “hey, I don't know if you know we are doing this joke, if you would like to come on at the end of the year I will keep going and we'll set it up. If not, we will stop.” Because we did not want to get into that situation, exactly like you say, where you are building to a payoff, and you can't stick the landing. So once we knew he was going to come at the end of the year, at that point, and this is five jokes in, at that point we realized, oh, we are continuing this at the end of the year then. But you can confidently accelerate knowing that the payoff is going to be beautiful."

You can check out Driver’s participation in the show in the clip below. HBO premieres the new season of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on February 20. You can also stream it on HBO Max. Look for Steve's full interview with John Oliver next week.