After canceling her Manic World Tour due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Halsey took a moment to reflect on what she missed and didn’t miss about touring on The Late Late Show With James Corden on Monday night.
She told the late-night talk show host about her relatively unscripted show that makes each night at each city unique. But “things go wrong all the time,” according to the 26-year-old pop star, and the worst of the accidents happened at one of the country’s most legendary arenas: Madison Square Garden in NYC.
“One time I was onstage, and everything stopped working — sound, lights, video, music, the whole thing, my brain,” she remembered. “Everything malfunctioned, and I had to stand on the stage for two minutes talking to the crowd…. Two minutes in stage time is like a century.”
A fan-captured video from that night shows Halsey’s impromptu monologue that she launched into mid-performance of her Badlands song “Castle” during her sold-out Badlands Tour stop on Aug. 13, 2016.
“When that happened to me, I just started my whole show over from the top,” Halsey said in her latest interview, “so that I could do the whole thing with no mistakes.”
Even though touring is her “favorite part” of her career,” acting will always be Halsey’s “first love.” The Manic singer is set to make her acting debut on the TV series The Players Table alongside Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney, who was featured in her “Graveyard” music video from October 2019.
“Acting was the first thing that I ever did,” she told Corden while recalling the community theater plays she participated in. The “Without Me” hitmaker named Rent as her favorite and High School Musical as her least favorite because of a very un-Troy Bolton reason. “I didn’t know how to dribble a basketball. Like I’m a theater kid, not an athlete,” she explained.
Watch Halsey’s interview on Corden below.