Grammys 2018: James Corden Makes a Confession About Hillary Clinton’s Appearance in that Fire and Fury Sketch

Viewers of the 2018 Grammy Awards were surprised to see former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pop up at the end of a video segment about celebrities reading Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, the salacious book about life inside the Trump White House. Nikki Haley wasn’t a fan of the bit, but it seems that the stars who participated were very into the idea—on the condition that the final reader would be Clinton. But that, host James Corden revealed, wasn’t a certainty until the last moment.

His team had the idea for the segment about 11 days before the Grammys, Corden explained on Monday night’s The Late Late Show, but knew the joke would only land if Clinton popped up at the end. “We’d emailed [Hillary’s] people and we had not heard anything, but we had to get on and shoot it,” Corden said. “So, basically, we just lied to everyone. We told Cher, ‘Oh, Hillary’s doing it.’ DJ Khaled, Snoop, Cardi B, they all said yes because they thought that Hillary was doing it and we had no idea whether Hillary would do it or not. We’d shot all the parts without her being there.”

Luckily, Clinton was up for participating—and lucky for Corden, as he noted, that he didn’t have to have to call Cher and admit he lied. Watch him recount the tale, below.

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