Ricky Gervais has spent 15 years doing something almost unheard of in Hollywood: naming the industry’s most uncomfortable truths directly to the faces of the people involved, on live television, in front of 200 million viewers. Gervais, who created the original UK version of *The Office*, became a global star without relying on American industry connections. He has said that this independence meant he owed Hollywood nothing. He hosted the Golden Globes five times between 2010 and 2020, and each time, he used the platform to call out the powerful.
Before his final hosting gig in 2020, Gervais explained his approach plainly. He said he had to choose between pandering to the 200 wealthy people in the ceremony room or entertaining the 200 million people watching at home who weren’t winning awards. He said it was a no-brainer, and he was doing it for the audience at home. At the January 2020 Golden Globes, just minutes into his monologue, Gervais referenced the “Lolita Express,” the private jet associated with Jeffrey Epstein, telling the room that the guests had made their own way to the ceremony in their own planes.
It was a direct reference to Epstein on live television. Later in the same show, Gervais told the room full of studio executives that they were all terrified of journalist Ronan Farrow, who broke the Harvey Weinstein story for *The New Yorker*. He then introduced Sandra Bullock by comparing her Netflix film *Bird Box* to working for Harvey Weinstein. Notably, Weinstein’s criminal trial was set to begin the very next morning.
Unlike many celebrities who face backlash for controversial jokes, Gervais did not apologize. The morning after the monologue, he tweeted a thank-you to fans for their “amazing comments,” adding “Make jokes, not war. ” Months later, he told Yahoo Entertainment that the monologue resonated because people were “tired of being lectured by multi-millionaires” and tired of the hypocrisy. Gervais’s pattern of pointed jokes dates back further.
At the 2010 and 2011 ceremonies, he joked about Mel Gibson, Charlie Sheen, and Bruce Willis, and made thinly veiled references to Scientology and closeted celebrities. He picked on Jodie Foster and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association itself in later years, and in 2016, he said he would rather have a drink with Mel Gibson than with Bill Cosby. A recurring question has been why the Hollywood Foreign Press Association kept inviting him back. Gervais told *The Hollywood Reporter* that he went after broad targets like “pretension and hypocrisy,” but the spectacle drew ratings, even as the industry bristled at it.
The 2020 monologue gained new attention in January 2024 when unsealed court documents from Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell revealed the names of celebrities, politicians, and others connected to Epstein. None of those named were accused of wrongdoing, but clips of Gervais’s 2020 performance circulated widely again. In March 2025, Attorney General Pamela Bondi released the first phase of Epstein’s contact files and flight logs, which included more celebrity names. Social media comment sections once again pointed to Gervais, noting that he had already begun addressing the subject years earlier.
When the 2025 Golden Globes chose Nikki Glaser as host instead, Gervais wrote and posted his own opening monologue from a bathtub selfie video on X. In it, he joked about the Vatican, Justin Timberlake’s 2024 drunk driving arrest, Sean “Diddy” Combs’s federal charges, and Epstein. Gervais has defended his approach in interviews. In a 2025 piece in the *Los Angeles Times*, he said he wants to take the audience to a place they haven’t been before, and that the Epstein line was a statement made in front of the people it was about.
He also argued that it is impossible to avoid offending someone, so there is no point in trying. Gervais’s willingness to speak openly stands in contrast to others who faced consequences for less. In 2005, Courtney Love warned a young woman on camera not to attend Harvey Weinstein’s private hotel party, and she was effectively blacklisted from mainstream Hollywood. Ronan Farrow spent years trying to publish his Weinstein investigation before *The New Yorker* ran it in 2017.
Across 15 years and five hosting gigs, Gervais built a reputation for saying out loud what many in the room preferred to keep quiet. As unsealed records and new revelations continue to surface, his old monologues are frequently cited as having described reality years before the broader public caught up.
