Joseph Gordon-Levitt has been acting since he was 7-years-old. Because of this, he isn’t able to hide from the unfortunate haircuts and embarrassing moments of youth like the rest of us can. His youthful sins were recorded and now those moving images rest in the poorly guarded graveyard that is the internet, waiting to be unearthed and mocked.
Footage of JGL’s Catcher in the Rye nerd-out on Celebrity Jeopardy has made the rounds before, but last night he got to relive it on national TV when Conan O’Brien brought it up during their interview as the two playfully mocked Jeopardy host Alex Trebek’s dickish dismissiveness of Levitt’s enthusiasm over his favorite book.
Gordon-Levitt even said that Trebek was drunk at the time, but while he quickly played that off as an innocent joke, I have to wonder if he was really just trying to get back at Trebek for his 17-year-old slight.
Let’s talk about the cold truth for a hot second: there isn’t a teenager alive who doesn’t worship Alex Trebek. He’s an icon, and when an icon treats you like a dumb and over-excited kid, that’s a gash to your soul that can’t be stitched up by time.
As for Conan, he has his own history with Trebek, so he has a some understanding of what JGL is going through and you can see that empathy in the margins of their movements and glances as they move on to talk about hitRECord on TV. It’s all very powerful.
Source: YouTube
