Yahoo Lifestyle Denis Leary Explains How He's Related to Conan O'Brien
When you’re a talk show host (and later podcast host) like Conan O’Brien, your job centers around talking to different celebrities every day for work.
As a result, he’s met plenty of big names in Hollywood, but he likely didn’t expect that one of them would turn out to be a long-lost relative.
Comedian and actor Denis Leary came up around the same time as O’Brien, even appearing as a guest on Late Night with Conan O’Brien several times to promote his work.
But after he got a relative a satellite dish to watch him on the talk show, he was in for a big surprise, he told Jimmy Fallon when he appeared on The Tonight Show on Jan. 23.
“My parents are Irish immigrants. They come from the same town, Killarney in Ireland, and they came over in like 1950 by boat, but very few of their brothers and sisters came, so the bulk of the family was still in Killarney,” he told Fallon, who is also of Irish descent.
He shared that his uncle Patrick, “who was the oldest brother in the Leary family,” was “watching me on Conan and he calls up one of my other cousins and says, ‘Listen, this guy that Denis is talking to, he’s one of our cousins.’”
Leary continued, explaining the family connection. “He said, ‘I think this guy is a Reardon.’ Reardon was the name of Conan’s mom. And he said, ‘I think there was a Reardon woman in Worcester, Massachusetts, who lived in a three-decker when your father and his brother Jerry got off in New York. They couldn’t find work solid here, so they went up to Boston, to Worcester, because that’s where this Reardon woman lived and she put them in the basement and got them real jobs, like paying jobs under the table.’”
When Leary shared the story with O’Brien, the talk show host confirmed it. “He went, ‘Oh my God, my family was originally from Worcester and then went to Brookline.’ So we’re like, ‘Oh my God, now look at us.’”
“Look at my hair and look at Conan’s hair and look at our skin. It’s the same,” said Leary about his cousin.
He also teased that he and O’Brien “look like two Irish aunts. We look like sisters, that’s what we look like!”
Next: Conan O'Brien Suffers Devastating Back-to-Back Family Losses
