NEW YORK — In his first post-“Tonight” show interview, Conan O’Brien said that if he had been in Jay Leno’s shoes, he would not have taken back the show less than a year after publicly handing it off to someone else.
“That’s me, you know,” O’Brien told Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes” in an interview to be broadcast Sunday, excerpts of which were released Thursday by CBS. “Everyone’s got their own way . . . of doing things.”
O’Brien, in the midst of a sold-out concert tour, said he decided to leave NBC because “this relationship is going to be toxic and maybe we just need to go our separate ways.”
He said if he had been Leno, he would not have taken the show back.
“I wouldn’t have done that,” O’Brien said.
Asked by Kroft what he would have done, O’Brien said, “Done something else, go someplace else. I mean, that’s just me.”
NBC and a Leno spokesman had no comment about O’Brien’s statements.
