Home » Latest » Trending TV » Superfan Brad Pitt Distracts Ellen While Sitting in the Audience

Superfan Brad Pitt Distracts Ellen While Sitting in the Audience

6

InfoSearched 66 0 Trending TV

8.6

SaveSavedRemoved 2

Brad Pitt crashed his own talk show appearance before it even started.

On the September 13, 2019 episode of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” Brad Pitt skipped the usual entrance music and walkout altogether. Instead, he slipped into the audience wearing a pageboy cap and a blue button-down, playing the part of an overeager superfan while Ellen DeGeneres tried to run her opening monologue. It didn’t take long for the bit to completely hijack the taping.

• Pitt sat in the crowd in disguise and heckled DeGeneres through her opening monologue and back-to-school segment, prompting her to admit on camera she was “kind of distracted.”
• He shouted lines including “Don’t mind me. Just came to see the show… You’re killing it!” and “I love the underwear!” while asking about Ellen Shop hours and sign jokes.
• Scheduled guest Sean Hayes, noting Pitt hadn’t been on the show in eight years, offered his own chair to “the guy from two episodes of ‘Growing Pains'” and swapped seats with him so Pitt could sit down to promote “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and “Ad Astra.”

The Setup

DeGeneres had no idea her audience plant was the actor himself. She pushed through her opening bits as Pitt kept talking over her from his seat, cracking jokes and playing dumb about who he was sitting next to. The longer it went, the more obvious it became that this wasn’t a random fan getting overexcited — it was a full bit, and DeGeneres was the only person in the room not initially in on it.

Pitt leaned into the “superfan” persona hard, asking about merchandise and sign-language jokes like someone who’d genuinely never been backstage. That’s part of what made it land: the gag depended on DeGeneres reacting in real time to a guy in her crowd who wouldn’t stop talking, and she couldn’t fully compose herself through it.

“Don’t mind me. Just came to see the show… You’re killing it!”

Sean Hayes Gets Written Out of His Own Interview

The disruption didn’t stay contained to the monologue. It bled straight into the interview segment booked for Sean Hayes, who was there to promote “Will & Grace.” Hayes, a frequent guest on the show, quickly clocked what the bit was setting up and played along rather than fight it.

Hayes pointed out that Pitt hadn’t sat in that chair in eight years while he himself had made the rounds plenty of times, then offered to hand over his spot to “the guy from two episodes of ‘Growing Pains'” — a dig referencing Pitt’s minor early-career TV credit. The two swapped seats on the spot: Hayes headed into the audience, and Pitt walked up to take the guest chair as the actual centerpiece of the segment.

Pitt Talks “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and “Ad Astra”

Once seated, Pitt dropped the bit enough to discuss the films actually on his promotional slate that fall: Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and James Gray’s “Ad Astra.” The stunt gave DeGeneres a segment that functioned as both a comedy sketch and a standard press stop, letting Pitt get his talking points in after spending several minutes making her laugh at her own expense.

The swap with Hayes also meant the show got two guests’ worth of material out of one interview slot — a structure DeGeneres’ producers have leaned on before when a big name wants an entrance that isn’t just a walkout past the desk, similar to the kind of audience-plant gags that have made her show a launching pad for viral clips, the same instinct that’s fueled pieces looking at how Ellen operates once the cameras are rolling and lists ranking the celebrities who’ve had complicated things to say about her show over the years.

Pitt hadn’t sat across from DeGeneres in eight years before this appearance, which is exactly why the bit worked as a reintroduction — nobody remembers a guy quietly walking out to promote a movie, but plenty of people remember the guy in the pageboy cap yelling about underwear from row twelve.