In 2005, Bill Hader landed his very first on-camera TV gig — and Ashlee Simpson ended up tears.
During Hader’s appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen on Thursday night, a fan called in to ask a rather obscure question: Has he kept in touch with the pop singer since he helped prank her on Ashton Kutcher‘s beloved hidden camera show, Punk’d?
“Oh, yeah — I talk to her every day actually,” Hader, 39, said sarcastically. “She’s still pissed off that I punk’d her — what was that, 13 years ago? Yeah, I was on the show Punk’d before I was on SNL.”
“You have the best resume,” remarked host Andy Cohen, 49.
So what was the premise of the Simpson prank? Well, turns out it was pretty elaborate — and, in Hader’s own words, “terrible.”
“It was an art gallery and it was my dead brother’s artwork,” he explained. “She put her jacket down and somehow the jacket caught on fire and set off the sprinklers and it ruined all the artwork. So we actually flooded this art gallery, and then I had to come out all wet, holding this artwork, like, ‘Look what you did!'”
“You have the wig in and they’re like, ‘Say this, say that,'” he recalled. “And I was just going, ‘Guys, she’s crying. I don’t know what to say, I feel so terrible, I feel so bad.'”
“It was my first professional job as an actor … and I felt so terrible,” he added. “I was just apologizing, and I don’t think they brought me back after that because I felt too bad.”
Of course, once she found out it was just a joke, Simpson recovered — sort of.
“She was laughing,” Hader said. “But through her tears.”