In 2023, Ayo Edebiri made a South by Southwest red carpet comeback – she played Donkey in Banshees of Inisherin, and she spent months preparing for the role.
“I lived in Ireland for about four months and I got very out of character,” Edebiri said in an interview with Letterboxd . “I was on all fours for four months and it was very painful, but beautiful too.”
The bit quickly rectified—soon, she was being included in the social media roundups of major Irish celebrities, thanking the Irish during awards seasons, and being vindicated by the Irish media. On a recent episode of the podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, Edebiri gave more context on how a red carpet bloat joke 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.
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“My favorite kind of joke, low-key, can be a lie,” Edebiri explained to O’Brien. “Like it could be a lie. It’s barely funny. It’s mostly funny to me.”
It wasn’t, however, so funny for her team, who showed up for the red carpet interview that started it all.
“I remember that moment, I saw my PR (representative), she was in the corner of my eye,” Edebiri told O’Brien. “She was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no.'”
“Well, it depends on what the lie was,” O’Brien interrupted.
“It was just me like, ‘Oh yeah, well, you know, I was in Ireland and it was creepy,'” Edebiri continued. “And she (the PR) was like, ‘Okay, sort of a mental breakdown on the horizon.'”
It was only fair that someone focused on maintaining Edebiri’s image would worry about how a comment about being Irish when you can’t wouldn’t be taken well online, but it all turned out better than anyone could have imagined.
Despite the press’s abject panic over Edebiri ‘s claim to have played the animal star of an Oscar-nominated film, the joke continued to grow. Besides being a hit on social media, it also became a running gag during the awards season. “I want to thank my real family, I don’t know if they have CW overseas,” Edebiri said at the 2024 Critics’ Choice Awards. “To everyone in Boston, Barbados, Nigeria, Ireland in various 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 role, and joked to O’Brien that she’s a great actor—whether for comedy, drama, or animal work. “I’m kind of the Andy Serkis of the equine community,” she laughed.
