Rachel Bloom is elaborating on the Twitter exchange between her and Neil Patrick Harris that went viral after the 2018 Tony Awards.
If you missed it, Neil wrote, “Who is the woman in the top hat backstage at The Tony Awards? Gideon remarked that she says ‘like’ and ‘oh my god’ a lot. I’m confused…” Of course, Rachel was the “woman in the top hat backstage,” and she responded, “I’m a big fan of yours. We’ve met numerous times and my husband, Dan Gregor, wrote for “How I Met Your Mother” for 5 years. Notably, he wrote the episode where your character finally meets his father.”
“It wasn’t a joke. Basically… I saw that tweet. And I was kind of devastated. I was actually going to tweet, ‘This makes me sad.’ But then I was like, “Ehhhhhhhhhh… I don’t want to give him that, necessarily,’” Rachel told GQ days after the incident. “Look. I’ve met him a couple times. Very recently, backstage in the dressing room of a Broadway show. And we hung out for a solid 15 minutes with the star of this Broadway show. It was just bizarre to me that it wouldn’t ring a bell. And also, that he wouldn’t Google it.”
“But look, he’s not a writer, so his version of a Twitter joke is to just kind of… live-comment to Twitter followers with kind of random, unformed thoughts. And fame does that to you—where you think every kind of random, unformed thought is a gem, because you get 10,000 likes from it. He has, like, 27 million Twitter followers. And that makes me scared about fame in general. The yes-men. Even if what you’re saying is, I don’t know, kind of weird or unoriginal, you’re still getting a lot of approval and dopamine surges for saying it,” Rachel continued. “And I guess what I would say is, the thing he said in response [to my tweet] wasn’t really an apology as much as saying, like, ‘Well said! Thanks for the reminder.’”
Neil later “sincerely apologized” to Rachel for the incident in the tweet, which you can see below.
