First of all, I’m really jazzed that Doutzen Kroes is on the cover of Vanity Fair. I was so pleased to see her, I barely acknowledged Jimmy Fallon. But the cover is supposed to be about Jimmy! He’s taking over The Tonight Show and nowadays there are lots of magazine covers devoted to “the new late night”. Seth Meyers got the cover of Time Mag last week too, because Seth is taking over Fallon’s late-late-night time slot. Anyway, Jimmy has now “arrived” and he’s not even 40 years old yet. Fallon spoke to VF about life lessons from Lorne Michaels, Saturday Night Live obsession and striking out in Hollywood:

Jimmy Fallon had one dream as a teenager—to be on Saturday Night Live. In his puritanical devotion, he insisted on watching the show alone. “I just didn’t want anyone ruining my experience,” Fallon tells contributing editor David Kamp in Vanity Fair’s February cover story. “No small talk. I wanted to see the sketches, the new characters, what the angle was.”

His parents were unusually overprotective—“We weren’t even allowed to cross the street on our own until we were 10 or 12,” says Fallon’s sister Gloria—but in a characteristically offbeat gesture, they allowed the high-school-age Fallon to drink beer while watching S.N.L. at home. “As long as I wasn’t doing anything at night, I’d just sit by myself, and I would have a six-pack of Pabst,” he says. “I don’t know if I made it all the way through the six, but I’d just sit there and watch the show. And tape it.”

His obsession helped him ace the notoriously difficult audition at the age of 24. “I was there in the room that day,” former S.N.L. writer Tina Fey tells Kamp. “He’s one of two people I’ve ever seen who was completely ready to be on the show. Kristen Wiig is the other one…. And Jimmy was ready­­—like, if there had been a show to do that night.”

Fallon also discusses the close relationship he developed with Lorne Michaels while a cast member on S.N.L. “Lorne helped me with everything—with relationships, with me getting famous,” Fallon tells Kamp. “I was going through certain steps, and there were certain things I couldn’t talk to my dad about, because he wouldn’t know. Like ‘I have money now. Do I still rent? Do I buy an apartment?’ Or ‘I’m in L.A., and I have to rent a car.’ [“Lorne” voice] ‘You should get a Lexus, because you want to be quiet.’ Or ‘Should I date this actress?’ [“Lorne” voice] ‘You can date her, but you probably shouldn’t marry her.’ And he’d be totally right.”

Fallon left S.N.L. in the spring of 2004, having not yet turned 30, and he moved to Los Angeles to try his hand at movies, with poor box-office results. He tells Kamp that he considers his L.A. years a kind of lost period. “I was probably drinking more than I should have been drinking,” he says. “It wasn’t, like, sitting and watching old tapes of me on S.N.L., with the screen flickering in front of me. But I was like: ‘I can’t figure out what I want to do.’”

It was Michaels who intervened, broaching the idea with Fallon that perhaps a job hosting Late Night would be a good fit. As Fallon prepares to take the helm at The Tonight Show, he and his team are proceeding carefully, wary of scaling things up too significantly, lest they sacrifice the charm of what they currently have. “It’s still going to be the same show,” Fallon tells Kamp. “What I can tell you is it will be the best of what we do.”

[From Vanity Fair]

I have to admit, I think Fallon has done a pretty great job with Late Night. I wasn’t expecting him to work SO well as a late-night host, but he’s funny, he’s silly, he’s campy and he’s a surprisingly good interviewer. I think he’s smart to be worried that the charm he’s created with Late Night will be lost in the move to The Tonight Show. The Tonight Show is super-corporate, a huge cash cow for NBC, and the scrutiny will be much different for Fallon. We’ll see.

Photos courtesy of VF, WENN.