Nate Bargatze Is Still Trying to Explain His Emmys Money Bit

September 25, 2025
6:52 pm

Can Nate Bargatze make it make cents? More than a week later, the host of the 2025 Emmys is still trying to break down the thought process behind taking money away from the Boys & Girls Club of America if a celebrity took longer than 45 seconds to accept their award. “I wasn’t trying to overshadow any of their speeches,” Bargatze said during the September 24 episode of his Nateland podcast. According to the comedian, he’d assumed that the studios behind winning shows, like Netflix and Apple, would pay the difference for the CBS-approved bit. “In my head, I pictured it as [actors] could then go long but then be a hero. So it was like a win-win,” he explained. “Then the night becomes about love and giving to these kids that are there and all this kind of stuff. And I don’t know if I just didn’t explain it enough in the room.”

Bargatze said he had never expected individual winners, like adolescent Adolescence star Owen Cooper (“I covered for that kid,” Bargatze clarified), to open their own wallets. But Bargatze also hadn’t anticipated that his hosting duties would lead him to announce at the end of the night that he would be making a $250,000 donation himself. “I wasn’t gonna give that money at the end,” he admitted. “I wasn’t thinking I was gonna have to. But the way it went, I was like, ‘Well, I can’t … I’m not gonna not.’”

“I wasn’t gonna give that money at the end. I wasn’t thinking I was gonna have to.”