Nasim Pedrad’s Teenage Vision Board Had One Very Specific Redhead
Monday Muse: Every teenager has a vision board, a bedroom wall, a notebook margin or some other tiny shrine to whatever felt important at 15. For Nasim Pedrad, that meant the usual ’90s coming-of-age inspirations — Destiny’s Child, Home Alone, Claire Danes energy — and, apparently, one lanky late-night host with very recognizable hair.
Yes. Conan O’Brien.
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Nasim’s Very Specific Teen Crush
Before celebrity crushes became algorithm-fed mood boards, Nasim Pedrad had Conan O’Brien sitting right alongside her favorite ’90s pop-culture obsessions.
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Pedrad revealed the crush during a 2014 appearance on CONAN, and Team Coco later resurfaced the segment in its archive under the very efficient title Nasim Pedrad’s Huge Teen Crush on Conan. The original segment aired September 15, 2014, long before Pedrad would return to Conan’s orbit to talk about her own series, Chad.
What makes the clip land is that Pedrad does not present it like some manufactured late-night anecdote. She brings receipts. Her teenage vision board included Conan right alongside the movies, musicians and cultural obsessions that helped define her adolescence. Team Coco’s own description boils it down perfectly: Conan figured prominently on the board alongside Home Alone and Destiny’s Child.
Conan’s reaction is exactly why the moment survives so well. There is no polished celebrity-romance framing here. He is amused, flattered and slightly bewildered that somebody who would later become an SNL cast member had once put his face in the same aspirational collage as the biggest pop-culture names of the era.
And honestly? We get it.
By the mid-1990s, Conan had become his own strange species of celebrity crush: awkward, cerebral, self-deprecating, aggressively tall and somehow cooler because the entire act was built around pretending he was not cool at all. Pedrad’s confession is funny because it sounds unexpected — until you remember how many people grew up watching late-night television and quietly built entire personalities around whoever made them laugh after midnight.
The bit also feels sweeter in hindsight because Pedrad’s career eventually crossed directly into the kind of comedy world she grew up admiring. After Saturday Night Live, she created and starred in Chad, playing an awkward 14-year-old Persian-American boy desperately trying to navigate high school. The series was weird, committed and much funnier than its short life suggested — yes, INYIM stamps that one underrated.
Years later, Team Coco’s Nasim archive would include not just the crush confession but later conversations about Chad, her immigration story, family, technology mishaps and the very specific comic universe that made her such a natural fit on Conan’s couch in the first place.
Still, this is the clip we return to because there is something perfectly Monday Muse about realizing the person you pinned to a teenage board eventually became somebody sitting across from you asking why, exactly, his face was there.
Watch Nasim Pedrad Confess Her Teenage Crush on Conan O’Brien
The archived CONAN segment revisits Pedrad’s teenage vision board and her wonderfully unexpected late-night crush.
Source: Team Coco / CONAN.
