Back in 2023, Ayo Edebiri made a joke on the South by Southwest red carpet — she’d played the donkey in Banshees of Inisherin, and she spent months preparing for the role.
“I lived in Ireland for about four months, and I got really in character,” Edebiri said in an interview with Letterboxd. “I was on all fours for four months and it was really painful, but beautiful as well.”
The bit quickly avalanched — soon, she was being included on social media roundups of the top Irish celebrities, thanking the Irish during award seasons and being claimed by Irish media. On a recent episode of the podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, Edebiri gave more context to how an offhand joke on the red carpet turned into such a long running, international bit — including how her team thought she might be on the verge of a mental breakdown when she said it.
Don’t Miss
“My favorite type of joke, low-key, might be a lie,” Edebiri explained to O’Brien. “Like it might be a lie. It’s almost not even funny. It’s mostly just funny to me.”
It wasn’t, however, so funny to her team, who stood out of frame for the red carpet interview that started it all.
“I remember in that moment, I saw my PR (rep), she was in the corner of my eye,” Edebiri told O’Brien. “She was kind of like, ‘No no no no no.’”
“Well, it depends on what the lie was,” O’Brien interjected.
“It was just me being like ‘Oh yeah, well, you know, I was up in Ireland, and I was chilling,” Edebiri continued. “And she (the PR) was like, ‘Okay, sort of a mental breakdown on the horizon.’”
It was fair that someone focused on maintaining Edebiri’s image would worry about how a comment about being Irish when you aren’t might not be taken well online, but it all turned out better than anyone could imagine.
Despite the press person’s abject panic about Edebiri claiming to have played the animal star of an Oscar-nominated film, the joke just kept growing. Aside from being a hit on social media, it also became a running gag during awards shows. “I want to thank my real family, I don’t know if they have CW abroad,” Edebiri said at the 2024 Critics’ Choice Awards. “To everybody in Boston, Barbados, Nigeria, Ireland in many ways.” (Edebiri was raised in Boston by a Barbadian mother and Nigerian father.)
Later in an interview with Entertainment Tonight, she said, “Shout out to my people! Shout out to Derry, shout out to Cork! Shout out to Killarney, shout out to Dublin!”
It became such a big deal that even The Irish Times claimed the actor as one of their own.
Similarly, Edebiri described being approached by other Irish actors with welcoming arms during the height of the bit, and joked with O’Brien that she’s a great actor — whether it’s for comedy, drama or animal work. “I’m sort of the Andy Serkis of the equine community,” she laughed.
Content shared from www.cracked.com.