Fallon

Ejae, Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami went up, up, up for their “Golden” moment on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”

The trio, who provide the singing voices for the animated “KPop Demon Hunters” central girl group Huntr/x, hit the late-night TV show Tuesday to perform the Netflix movie’s signature song. It marks the first time they have hit the stage together for a live, full-length performance of “Golden,” and even Fallon could not contain his excitement.

The first No. 1 female K-pop song in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, “Golden” has helped propel the “KPop Demon Hunters” soundtrack to its newest accolade. Fallon informed Ejae, Nuna and Ami during the show that the record had gone platinum.

When asked about their experiences around the massive popularity of “KPop Demon Hunters,” the trio offered words including “surreal,” “scrumptious” “delicious,” “stunning” and “bonkers.”

“We try to come up with new adjectives every time,” said Nuna, who provides the singing voice for Mira.

Their “Tonight Show” appearance follows their brief cameo on the Season 51 premiere of “Saturday Night Live.” During their sitdown interview with Fallon, both Nuna and Ami (the singing voice of Zoey) recounted real-life encounters with “Golden” that drove home the magnitude of “KPop Demon Hunters’” impact.

For Nuna this happened on a trip to Korea when she saw an elderly street performer playing “Golden” on a traditional Korean instrument.

“I had to do a double take because in Korean culture, it’s especially impressive if an elderly person is impressed with you,” said Nuna, who explained that Korean elders rarely bat an eye at accomplishments like attending an Ivy League college or graduating top of your class. “It’s really hard [to impress them]. They have high standards. So for the older generation to embrace it, it’s something different.”

Ami’s encounter was with a much younger fan. She recalled a trip to an H Mart where she saw a young boy singing “Golden” at the top of his lungs while holding hands with his mother.

“I think it’s one thing to hear our song on the radio, but to hear it come out of a child, live?” Ami said. “In H Mart, my favorite place? … I just cried at HMart.”

Ejae, meanwhile, offered an anecdote that suggests “Golden’s” success may have been preordained.

Prompted by Fallon, the co-writer of “Golden” shared that while recording her part of the song at the studio, she saw a brief glimpse of “a grunge ghost.”

It was “a tall dude with a flannel … and blue jeans,” Ejae said. And this brief encounter may have been auspicious.

“My mom reminded me later [that] there’s a myth in Korea in the music [business], if you see a ghost or any paranormal activity while recording a song, it’s a hit,” she said.

TV STAR Jimmy Fallon, 50, has given fans an insight into his family life and shared a rare photo with wife Nancy Juvonen, 58, and their daughters.

The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon host posted the adorable picture on social media alongside his wife and their girls Winnie, 12, and Frances, 10.

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The family-of-four can be seen enjoying a lakeside getaway in the fun snap on their holiday wearing casual summer gear.

Comedian Fallon and his loved ones threw their arms in the air and struck some comedy poses in the playful shot.

His partner Juvonen flashed a peace sign and wrapped an arm around her daughter, wearing a pastel cross-over stripped dress.

“This is before my sister-in-law said, ‘a little less,’” Fallon joked in his caption.

Famous friends commented on the cute photo with a string of heart emojis, including Camila Cabello, Paris Hilton, while Ellen DeGeneres liked the snap.

Fans praised: “Beautiful family.”

A second added: “Awesome family post!”

A third agreed: “Such a joy to see a happy and loved Jimmy’s family.”

When Fallon is not in the studio, he can often be found at home, spending time with his wife, Nancy and Frances and Winnie.

The stand-up comedian, television host, actor, writer, and singer was born on September 19, 1974, in Bay Ridge, New York.

He first gained recognition as a cast member on Saturday Night Live but later became a household name in 2014 after taking over The Tonight Show following Jay Leno’s departure.

Fallon’s extensive career in the entertainment industry has helped him amass a $70 million fortune, according to Celebrity Net Worth.

He has also written several books and two comedy albums.

In 1998, he joined the cast of Saturday Night Live and remained there until 2004.

Jimmy’s big break came in 2009 when he landed his own talk show, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.

In May last year The Tonight Show aired a special two-hour program to celebrate Fallon’s 10th anniversary on the show.

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Jimmy Fallon once grabbed a cigarette out of Greg Gutfeld’s mouth, crinkled it up and tossed it to the ground, hollering at the Fox News personality, “Those things will kill you!” But it sounds like the place where they were hanging out had a shot at killing them too.

The two late-night hosts were both “wasted” about 15 years ago when he and Fallon met for the first time at an illegal Hell’s Kitchen bar run by a mutual friend — one who looked like “a cross between a Viking and a larger Viking,” the “Gutfeld!” host said Thursday night on NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”

The bar looked “like a place where special-ops forces waterboard terrorists,” he added. “There was no bar … it was a cooler, like the kind you take to a beach.”

“Dude, you’re not making this up,” Fallon said. “I totally know what you’re talking about. … I think I remember bringing beer into the bar and then him charging me for my own beer.”

The men’s magazine editor-turned-satirist recalled that their mutual friend operated that way. “He is very cheap, but if you want someone dead, he’ll do it.”

So he walks into the illegal bar with his buddy Andy Levy after the two had just finished taping something — perhaps “Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld” — and Fallon sees him and then tackles him, he said, “like a giant golden retriever.” Then the NBC host grabs Andy and the two fall to the ground wrestling. So Gutfeld decides it’s a good time to spark up a cigarette.

But Fallon leaps up, rips it out of his mouth and shouts the aforementioned you’re-gonna-die warning. “I go … ‘Dude, I’m not rich. You’re rich,’” Gutfeld said. “Cigarettes are expensive in New York City.”

He said Fallon’s face suddenly changed to one of sadness. “And then you left.”

Five minutes later, the “Saturday Night Live” alumnus came back toting a fresh pack of Parliaments, which he handed to the co-host of “The Five.”

“And I go, ‘That was really sweet. You want me to die.’”

Gutfeld, who was on “The Tonight Show” to promote a new game show he’s hosting, then remembered the group piling into Fallon’s car and tooling around to another bar that was, well, in the same building. “We literally drove from one door to another door … I think you wanted to impress that you had a driver.”

These are the things, apparently, that happen to the rich.

“Yeah!” Fallon said. “We had a nice ride, right?”

A nice ride indeed. Short, but nice. Meanwhile, over on “Gutfeld,” fill-in host Kat Timpf was talking about her erstwhile boss taking two full days off work to get a colonoscopy. Oh, how times have changed.

And the tables have indeed turned quite a bit in the last 15 years: “Gutfeld!,” which airs on Fox News at 7 p.m. local time and 10 p.m. Eastern and riffs on politics and the news of the day, is leading the nighttime chat show pack with — according to LateNighter — 3.289 million viewers in the second quarter and 238,000 in the advertiser-coveted demographic of those ages 18 to 49.

Fallon’s “Tonight Show” drew only 1.19 million viewers in the second quarter with 157,000 in the demo. That trails Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show,” which has a year to go before cancellation and leads the 11:35 p.m. broadcast pack with 2.42 million viewers and 219,000 in the demo in the second quarter, followed by “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” with 1.77 million viewers and 220,000 in the demo.

At a recent news conference, President Trump touched on questions about tariffs, Gaza and vaccines before zeroing in on one of his favorite subjects: TV and radio ratings. A journalist, referring to an unconfirmed report that Howard Stern’s SiriusXM radio show was being canceled, handed Trump a sugar-coated softball: “Is the Hate Trump business model going out of business because it’s not popular with the American people?”

The president was primed and ready to take a swipe at late-night television, namely Paramount’s recent cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and other types of hosted programs he perceives as The Enemy. Anything to distract from his broken promises around IVF funding, a tepid jobs report and his failure in producing the Epstein files.

“Colbert has no talent,” said the president. “I mean, I could take anybody here. I could go outside in the beautiful streets and pick a couple of people that do just as well or better. They’d get higher ratings than he did. He’s got no talent. Fallon has no talent. Kimmel has no talent. They’re next. They’re going to be going. I hear they’re going to be going. I don’t know, but I would imagine because they’d get — you know, Colbert has better ratings than Kimmel or Fallon.”

Ratings are important to Trump. It’s data he’s fond of weaponizing. Just ask his “Celebrity Apprentice” successor Arnold Schwarzenegger. But what about the president’s ratings?

According to a Gallup poll, six months into Trump’s second term, his job approval rating has dipped to 37%, the lowest of this term and just slightly higher than his all-time worst rating of 34% at the end of his first term.

In comparison to other two-term presidents at the same point in their presidency, he’s well below the 59% average, second-quarter rating set by all post-World War II presidents elected from 1952 to 2020. Bill Clinton (44%) came the closest as the only other president to have a sub-majority approval rating during his second quarter.

So Trump and Clinton do have something in common other than their association with the late sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein. Which brings us to polling numbers about Trump’s handling of those files.

A recent YouGov poll shows 46% of Americans think Trump was involved in crimes allegedly committed by Epstein. A whooping 82% of Americans — including 91% of Democrats and 76% of Republicans — believe that the government should release all documents it has on the Epstein case. And only 4% of those polled are in favor of Trump pardoning Epstein’s co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell.

There are no major polls yet on how folks feel about Maxwell being quietly moved from a Florida prison to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas where the majority of inmates are serving time for nonviolent offenses and white-collar crimes. Maxwell’s role in a violent crime — the recruiting and trafficking of minors for sex — led to her 20-year sentence.

Trump’s public obsession with ratings date back to his time hosting the television reality competition “The Apprentice.” It was a genuine hit in that first season, rounding out the year 2004 as the seventh-most-watched TV show of the year.

But its ratings declined steadily each year after that, according to the Chicago Tribune, from 11th place overall in its second season, to 15th, then 38th. By its sixth season, it finished as the 75th-most-watched show. If Trump’s presidency were a reality TV show, he’d be headed into his sixth season.

Enough about TV shows. Let’s look at a quantifiable way to apply television ratings to the presidency: inaugurations. According to Nielsen, Trump’s first swearing-in ceremony drew 30.6 million total viewers — 19% less than Barack Obama’s in 2009, when 37.8 million tuned in.

Trump’s 2025 swearing-in ceremony had 6 million fewer U.S. viewers than his first-term inauguration. Even worse, that’s 9 million fewer viewers than Biden attracted for his big day in 2021.

Here’s where the art of distraction comes in handy. Focus on other people’s faults to cover your own. Enter the Clintons, again. At Wednesday’s news conference, Trump said that shock jock Stern’s ratings “went down when he endorsed Hillary Clinton [in 2016].” What’s Trump’s excuse?

One may be the loneliest number, but No. 2 is what sent Shaquille O’Neal urgently mincing off the “Inside the NBA” stage last month while the cameras kept running.

O’Neal copped to the truth Thursday night during his 18th appearance on “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon,” giving what might be more detail than anyone needed about that sudden departure in April.

First, he clung to the fib, saying, “I was drinking a lot of water that day. So I know I had the No. 2 run, but it was really a No. 1. So let’s just get that out of the way.”

He explained he was drinking olive oil at the time “to be sexy,” because he’d seen on Instagram that if he drank olive oil daily for 14 days, he would clean out his system and have a flat stomach. “So I was trying that.”

A laughing Fallon held his face in his hands.

“You know what,” O’Neal said. “I just made a mistake. I lied to you on national TV. It wasn’t a No. 1 run. It was a No. 2 run. I had to go bad. Oh, I had to go so bad.”

Fallon begged him to keep telling the lie. O’Neal asked whether the host had seen him squeezing his butt cheeks as he scooted away from the “Inside the NBA” desk.

Then Fallon showed a photo of what the crew did to O’Neal the next day: It put a blue porta-potty in studio on his side of the table.

Blessedly, the conversation then moved in a different direction.

Things were a bit more serious but no less amusing back in April when O’Neal got up while a co-host was in the middle of talking and — in a big hurry — walked awkwardly in front of his fellow panelists and out the stage door. Ernie Johnson Jr., Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley weren’t sure what was going on.

“You all right, big fella?” Barkley asked with a look of concern on his face.

As the camera (cruelly) followed him, O’Neal blurted to his co-hosts to “go ahead, keep talking” while one reminded him, “Hey, we’re on TV.”

“It’s that olive oil you’ve been drinking,” Barkley said. “Hey, take some matches with you.”

As the remaining hosts broke into giggles, Kenny Smith said, “After 40, you can’t hold it no more.”

“That wasn’t something planned, was it?” Ernie Johnson Jr. wondered.

Smith also noted that O’Neal had been drinking olive oil to clean out his system, saying, “Oh, he’s cleaning out his gut all right!”

“I did not like his gait as he left!” Johnson said.

And Barkley simply couldn’t move past the idea of the smell.

“Please turn his mic off, that’s all,” Smith quipped. Then, as Smith tried to return to talking about L.A. Clippers forward Kawhai Leonard, the team in TNT’s Studio J came through with the instant replay of Shaq bailing out. Instant. Freaking. Replay.

IN SLO-MO.

The three very professional analysts immediately began very professional analysis of O’Neal’s shambolic gait.

The big man returned fairly soon after that, mumbling something about drinking too much water and about Barkley talking way too long when he really needed to cut to a break.

“Sorry about that, America,” he said.

Seriously Shaq, you have absolutely no reason to apologize. As long as you remember the matches.