Now recovered from a health scare that postponed her world tour, pop icon Madonna is gearing up to hit the road. But while the 65-year-old Material Girl will likely welcome a slew of celebrities to (albeit briefly) share her stage, don’t expect journalist and celebrity Anderson Cooper to join them, as he’s apparently still traumatized from the last time he mounted the dais with Madonna.
Cooper’s been tight with Madonna for years, enough so that she did a revealing interview with him a decade ago and even macked with him from the GLAAD awards stage in 2013.
Two years later, during the Barclays Center stop of Madonna’s Rebel Heart Tour, she called Cooper up during her performance of “Unapologetic Bitch,” during which he danced, was spanked and humped, and ate a suggestively-presented banana. The performance was widely-reported at the time, even by Cooper himself who wrote on Facebook then that he had (sic throughout) an “amazing night Madonna concert. Got to dance onstage with her!”
But in the years since, it appears Cooper has rethought his experience of the night, and no longer recalls it in such glory. In an appearance this week on fellow TV host Kelly Ripa’s Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast, Cooper is far less sanguine about the evening.
“I’m mortified,” Cooper said when Ripa brought up the 8-year-old performance. “I mean, I loved the whole idea, but I love the experience of it. I don’t love the video that exists of it, the reality.”
“I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I was terrible. I danced terribly,” Cooper said. “And then all of a sudden you find yourself like you’re standing on this thing, and then she hands you a banana, and right before that she’d like pushed me over and humped me, which I didn’t expect it all.”
“So I open it up and I start to peel it and eat the banana, and then all of a sudden I start lowering down on this little electronic elevator disappearing on the stage just like eating this banana,” Cooper said. “I don’t know. To this day, I don’t know what happened.”
This isn’t the first time Ripa has brought up Madonna’s pas de deux with Cooper: in 2017, during an appearance on what was then known as Live with Kelly and Ryan, Ripa grilled Madonna about the night in question. Cooper was “uncharacteristically rigid” while on stage with her, Madonna said, noting that his dance style is far less inhibited when the two hit the floor at various nightclubs.
“I was screaming like a stage mom, ‘you’re blowing it’” Ripa said of her reaction at the time. “It’s interesting,” Madonna replied, “some people who are always on camera get a little shy onstage.” Perhaps if Cooper finds himself onstage with a music legend in the future, he’ll consider Madonna’s insights, and imagine the audience not naked—as you or I might be coached to do—but as camera operators, ready to catch him breaking some news.