Matt Rogers on His Christmas Tour, the State of Hollywood and His Unexpected Next Podcast Idea

Over the last near-decade, Matt Rogers has been putting forward his pop culture takes on Las Culturistas, the podcast he hosts with real-life pal and former Saturday Night Live cast member Bowen Yang.

The actor, comedian and singer has quite-literally taken his show on the road for his annual Christmas tour, dubbed Christmas in December for 2025. During the show, he performs his Christmas comedy album Have You Heard of Christmas? to crowds across the country.

He’s on a quick break from that tour during this conversation, preparing to wrap just in time for Christmas. Immediately after we wrap, he heads to Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live, alongside Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Heather Gay.

“[Today’s] the day before Jen Shah is released from prison. I said, ‘It’s like the opposite of Christmas Eve probably for her,’” he jokes on a Zoom call. He’s doing a quick recap of his recent pop culture favorites — a “culture catch-up,” a common segment on his podcast, for any Readers, Kayteighs, Publicists, Finalists or Kyles out there.

Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra” was his top song of 2025, according to his Spotify Wrapped, but he insists it’s a misrepresentation despite being proud of the fact. He says “That’s So True” by Gracie Abrams actually took his most played spot of the year.

“I’m watching Pluribus and [Real] Housewives of Salt Lake City,” he says moving onto television before sharing his unsurprising movie of the moment. “I’ve seen Wicked: For Good three times. That’s a combination of my best friend being in it and also gay.”

Perhaps the most unexpected pop culture revelation Rogers gives is his desire to read Olivia Nuzzi’s American Canto. “Something I’m not really that open about anymore because I just don’t want the smoke is I am a political junkie. I always have been,” he explains.

“I’m toying with the idea of starting another podcast,” he says before pausing and adding, “that’s breaking news,” but it’s something he’s thinking about it. “I’m trying to figure out ways to do something that’s going to be interesting to me and reveals maybe a new side of myself, but also doesn’t open myself up to chaos and some energy that I don’t need.”

Below, Rogers shares more about his tour, dealing with the occasional parasocial nature of being a podcaster, his thoughts on the state of Hollywood and how he takes care of himself.

How has your tour been? What have you been having the most fun doing while on the road?

Every year I say it’s the most fun tour yet, but I do think that this year it’s for real. We’ve been having a blast. The key to how much fun we have every year is just the group that I take on the road. I get to be a person now that says “I love my band,” but I truly do. The six of us are really traveling like a pack. We have me, my musical director, Henry, who’s on the keys and has been doing the show with me since 2017. [We also have] my drummer, Derek. We have my bassist, Jordan, my backup singer, Melissa, and our tour manager, Ethan. We’re one big happy family. We’re actually going to finish off the tour in Orlando, Florida, and I’m taking them all to Disney World.

When you decided to start doing this yearly tour, what were the apprehensions you had in taking this on?

Weirdly, I’m more comfortable singing now than I am without singing.

Really?

Yeah because I do feel like it’s how I would naturally express myself anyway. I’m always bursting into song. I also like the idea that it’s what sets my show apart. It’s not something I think you see everyone else doing. I don’t know, maybe it’s just the little gay boy in me that always wanted straight A’s because I have best little boy in the world syndrome. It can’t just be comedy. It also has to be a full length album.

Every year I’m like, “This year I’m going to take it easy on myself. I’m going to scale it back.” But no, I’ve added a new song, we got a new medley going. Doing this sort of pop star character that I do every year around this time of year is really fun for me because you get to embody that for a little while and it’s a blast.

I feel like what gives me trepidation every year when we’re going on the road is a lot of the songs I’ve written for myself are not easy to sing. I wrote a lot of them when I was 27 years old, and my voice was just cellularly different than it is now as a 35-year-old. But I’ve been working with a vocal coach, Doug Peck. He’s actually essential to me doing this every year.

As the years go on, between your own work as an actor and and the podcast with Bowen Yang, things have certainly become increasingly busy for you. Do you feel like this tour is something you can sustain doing down the line?

What I try to do all the time is just follow the fun, which is actually something they tell you in improv. It’s one of the true core lessons of it, is just do what feels good and do what feels fun. I really feel like as long as I’m on stage or doing whatever it is I’m doing and I can have fun doing it, that is what is important to me. Whether it’s acting, performing on stage, doing the podcast, hosting here and there, writing; I just like to work in general. I’m way happier when I feel like I have professional purpose. That does go on hand in hand with the fact that I genuinely love what I do. I feel bad for people that when they’re out doing press and they’re on shows, it’s clear that they don’t love the project.

Almost everything, knock on wood, that I do, I can fully get excited about talking about. I just try to keep it interesting for myself and keep it fun for me because then it’s fun for everyone else. So far, I don’t have anything that I’ve done that I’m like, “Oh God, this is a drag. I hate it. I’m not looking forward to it.”

I don’t think I’m going to go chasing them next year either. I feel like next year my goal for myself is to just enjoy what I’ve worked hard for and stop chasing as much and just really focus on the things that I have that need fostering. There’s a lot of things I need to get started on. Bowen and I have this movie at Searchlight, we have the podcast, we just resigned a contract for a few more years. I was super excited about that. We have the Culture Awards renewed, we have a book to write. There’s a couple other things that not everyone knows about that we’re working on, so it’s a lot. I don’t think I’ll necessarily be striving to add more onto my plate because there’s already a lot on there, luckily.

Hearing you say you follow the fun, there are obviously going to be things that come along where it seems like it’s something you should do or it feels like the next step. How do you come to terms with taking the things you have to do versus the things you want to?

I feel like this year more than ever, I’ve been more confronted with that. If you want to be busy, you can be busy. I’ve always identified as someone with limitless energy, and that’s just not true no matter who you are. I think some people have maybe more energy than others, but a couple times this year I just turned around and caught myself and I was exhausted. I think it has to do with the fact that I feel so lucky to get all these opportunities because I know there are no guarantees. You have to understand, my dad’s a physical education teacher. My mom’s a hairdresser from Long Island. No one in my family was involved in the arts or entertainment. Honestly, I think it was a good thing because I think if I had family or close friends who were really involved in the industry or really tried to be involved in the industry, I might’ve been cautioned away from trying to do it because really it’s a sort of heartbreaking road that has very little to do exclusively with being talented or working the hardest. Those are parts of it, but it’s not all of it. It’s definitely not a meritocracy. Now I can look back and say my parents were really supportive, but I think it’s because they were uninformed.

They didn’t quite know.

Exactly. When I get all these opportunities to do these things, I always say yes to them because I feel like how could I ever let the opportunity, the chance to do some of these things pass by? But that does come ultimately at the expense of your energy. I’m just learning to balance all these professional opportunities that I’m so grateful to get what’s healthy for me.

You’re finding your actual bandwidth.

Yeah, because I think we all lie to ourselves a little bit about what we can and can’t handle. You’ll tell yourself a lie because you don’t want people to worry about you or because you don’t want people to think you can’t do it and go to someone else who will gratefully take it on. At the same time, there’s the other side too, where people talk themselves out of things all the time. I never want to do that. I never want to have regrets about something that passed me by. It’s a little bit of a walk, but it’s a happy one. It’s truly a first world problem.

You’ve been doing the podcast for a while. You and Bowen have been pretty open and honest about yourselves there. But at the end of the day, the people listening don’t actually know you. How do you handle that almost one-way street of people feeling like they know you?

I really welcome our listeners approaching us with whatever energy it is. When it comes to the podcast and sharing about my life, I’m pretty much an open book. That’s not something I worry about. However, when your platform grows to include people who are not necessarily always listening with the best interests, it’s really just other people in my life that I get concerned about oversharing for. Certainly stories that I would tell from dating when I was doing the podcast in 2017, 2018, 2019 would affect someone differently that’s in my life now in 2025, heading into 2026, to all of these people. It’s not because I don’t want to share everything because I know that’s what binds me to my audience. I’m so grateful for that, but it’s really just me wanting to take care of the people in my life and also wanting to take care of other artists.

One of the things about our podcast is we’re very honest about our opinions, and we’re talking about pop culture in a fun way. But now being someone that’s an artist in the entertainment industry, which is an asterisk because it’s different than just being an artist in everyday life, there are so many considerations and things that go into a finished product that would make it a little bit unfair to judge it and drag it across the coal. I think that my maturity and my education of how all of this works is maybe informing maybe a little bit of a conservatism when it comes to talking about pop culture. We still have fun with everything. But I’m not going to go out there and attack another artist because I know that’s what it takes and what it’s like to create at this kind of level means that there’s a lot of reasons why something might be worthy of critique.

You guys are at a very different stage than when you started when you were able to give all these opinions, but now a lot of these people are your colleagues, and I imagine that’s uncomfortable.

I think that there’s comedy and then there’s just being a dick. There’s a huge difference. I think that people can tell the difference and can feel the difference. I’ve spoken to people who I’ve discussed on the podcast, who’ve been in projects that I would feel I was nervous about interacting with them. Then they laugh. People have a sense of humor, but I think that’s only because we’ve gotten a lot better, and I think the world has gotten a lot better, at least the public facing world, the online world has gotten much darker.

Maybe that’s why. It’s just like I see how much worse the trolling has gotten online and the social media bullying has got maybe because I’ve experienced the negative end of some of it. Not in a crazy way, but in a way that’s made me [decide] I’m going to be more mature and more thoughtful. And therefore, I hope more intelligent and funnier than I would’ve been about going on something I didn’t like. But I don’t think that the podcast has really changed that much. I think if you really listen back to when we started it in 2016, 2017, we treated our friends who were doing shows at UCB the same way we treat J-Lo now. They come in, we make them feel like the superstar that they are or have not yet become, but we feel they are, and we make them feel good. We use that as a stepping stool to start a great conversation and really just to make everyone feel like they hung out with someone for an hour and a half alongside us.

How are you and your friends in the industry feeling about what it’s like for talent out there right now?

It’s feeling much worse. It gets worse every year. I really think we need to say that too. Even as people who — I think people associate us with being busy, we’re still working hard to be this busy. This is universally across the board. I talk to all of my friends. We can all agree none of us have ever gotten less auditions. When you audition, we’re still doing the self-tape thing, which is not a good way to do it. It does not showcase how a performer can take a note. It does not showcase how quickly a performer can adjust to a note. It puts the performers in their own heads because they’re having to look at themselves all the time. [Self-editing] shouldn’t be part of acting.

I have a litany of problems with the state of the Hollywood thing right now. I’ve always been someone that really didn’t take myself very seriously, and I try to lead with that all the time. I really do think that’s the key to so much, just stop taking yourself so seriously. Honestly, I try to just laugh at it because the stuff that they’re trying is just not working, but they’ll just keep doing it.

Especially as all these companies merge, you kind of just have to laugh. And that’s why I’m like, what am I going to … I’m not going to say no to any opportunity. No, not if I feel like it’s fun to do, because what am I waiting for? You’re not waiting for anything. To answer your question, it is a terrible time in the industry.

How do you learn to take care of yourself then?

This is going to sound, on paper, sad, but I have less friends. I have fewer relationships in my life that I’m really pouring into, and the relationships that I’m really pouring into are really worthwhile and really fulfill me. I’ve never felt in my life more surrounded by people that love me and want me to win. It’s hugely important. I don’t overextend myself to try to force people into my life anymore. I feel this has been a big year for me. I’m 35. I think things have to come into moderation a little bit. I pushed myself to my limits this year in a couple of ways, and now I’ve landed in a place where I feel healthy. I prioritize sleep. Sleeping is huge. I also got a beta blocker prescription, which has been an unbelievably big deal for me. It’s just revolutionized my life because I just didn’t understand that anxiety was physical. I feel more confident than ever because I’m living in the moment more. I’m rested, I feel hydrated, I’m surrounded by good people and I’m beta blocked, babe.