Like a lot of you, Emmy-nominated Saturday Night Live breakout star Bowen Yang is a Swiftie. Except, unlike most of you, he actually got to meet Taylor Swift when she performed on SNL last month. Yang described the sublime experience on The Tonight Show on Thursday night (Dec. 16), and, to make us all feel better, admitted that he’s a Taylurker, too.
“Big Swiftie,” Yang, wearing a holiday-ready glittery, multi-colored jacket, told host Jimmy Fallon, who asked if the comedian got to meet the singer and if he was nervous having her on set. “I got to meet her at promos on Thursday… people at SNL threw me a bone and said that ‘you can stand next to her,’” he explained.
It was a huge deal, and Yang said he capitalized on the face time with his fave by telling her in an improvised line in the promo that her Red song “Treacherous” is “the sound of falling in love.” And then Yang did what any totally chill Swiftie would do: he stood outside of Taylor’s dressing room after the show wrapped late Saturday night and just… waited.
“I was not sure whether or not to knock on her door,” Yang said. “Sometimes they say, like, ‘don’t meet your heroes.’ She’s a hero. And she was lovely all week. But I was like, ‘after the show she’s probably riding high, she doesn’t want to talk to the riffraff like me.’” But he summoned his courage and finally knocked on the door.
Spoiler: Yang said Swift could not have been nicer, even when he said the thing she’s probably heard 1,000 times: “I don’t normally do this, but can we please take a picture?” Swift, of course, said yes and had her own question, asking Yang if it was okay if the “star and muse” of the singer’s “All Too Well” short film could be in it as well.
“I was like, ‘Of course!’” Fallon then showed the snap, in which a beaming Yang is in a Swift/Sink sandwich, with Taylor draping her arms around his neck as Sink flanks him on the left. “Pure bliss. I’m blissed out,” Yang said. But wait, there’s more. There were other people in the dressing room and Swift wondered who should take the picture. “And then, Deadpool himself, Ryan Reynolds, was like, ‘I’ll do it!,’” Yang gushed.
Fallon then zoomed out to reveal a casual Reynolds reflected in the mirror casually snapping the pic. Yang also talked about his holiday plans, which include teaching his mom how to use Netflix for the eighth year in a row, and chatted about his award-winning podcast, Las Culturistas.
Watch Yang on the Tonight Show below.
