James Corden on Carpool Karaoke Controversy: I Deserve Credit for Driving

It all started with a video posted to Twitter, showing a black Range Rover with Corden and Justin Bieber inside, being towed by a truck through Los Angeles traffic. Countless posts followed, with other sightings that proved that Corden wasn’t always driving while shooting the Carpool Karaoke segment.

To many people even remotely interested in showbiz, this made sense. Actors don’t always drive the cars they’re shown driving in movies, so it stood to reason to not have Corden endanger the lives of the celebrities and everyone else’s on the road by not being able to pay full attention to the act of driving. Because, you know, of all the singing and dancing and joking.

To others, it made no sense. A flurry of angry messages on social media followed, together with headlines that claimed he’d been exposed and that his show was revealed as the biggest con around.

The other night, he addressed all that on The Late Late Show. Of course, Corden is riding the wave of publicity by generating even more. But he also has a point in defending himself: this is television, not everything you see is real. They’re not really taping the show past midnight, and he’s not using the carpool lane for the segment. He doesn’t need celebrities’ help to get to work, either.

More importantly, though, there’s the issue of safety.

“I just want to say, right now, that I always drive the car unless we’re doing something where we think it might not be safe, like a dance routine or a costume change or if I’m drunk,” he says. “[But] 95% of the time I really am endangering the lives of the world’s biggest pop stars."

Also jokingly, Corden asked for due credit: most of the times, he does all the driving himself and he will not let this go unmentioned because he grew up in a country where they did all the driving on the other side of the road.