The Good Doctor’s Freddie Highmore is detailing a bizarre experience on the set of an undisclosed talk show.
The actor praised Jimmy Kimmel Live’s feel-good backstage area while visiting the show on Monday, noting that he’d been on other talk shows where it was a much more “challenging” environment instead. That includes one visit in which he was tossed into a broom closet by producers in order to avoid running into an unnamed TV show host.
“I’m trying to avoid saying the name, but this host doesn’t like seeing guests beforehand,” Highmore told Jimmy Kimmel on Monday’s episode. “So I was coming backstage with a couple of the producers and they looked up and they saw the host at the end of the corridor and they were really, really scared.”
So, naturally, the “terrified” producers came up with a unique strategy to get Highmore and themselves out of sight and out of mind of the host.
“They grabbed me and they threw me into the next door that was right by the hallway and it was a broom closet. A dark broom closet,” he said. “I was there for about a minute and they were like these sort of secret service agents on their phones like, ‘Are we clear? Are we good? Have they gone? Can we bring him out?’ Terrified.”
“You were stuck into a closet?” asked a surprised Kimmel. To which Highmore replied, “And then just walked out as if nothing happened!”
Highmore explained that visiting Kimmel’s show was a “much more pleasant way of spending my evening” these days, adding, “Thank you for being a decent human being.”
In an attempt to get Highmore to name-drop the host, Kimmel joked, “Kathie Lee Gifford did that to you?” Keeping his wits about him, the actor simply teased, “Close.”
If the awkward moment did happen backstage on Live!, then there’s a chance that Highmore may have actually stepped into the closet that later became Kelly Ripa’s office. Ripa recently revealed that it took three seasons to negotiate her own space in the studio, and even then it was just a small janitor’s closet.
To this day, Highmore said he’s not sure if the mystery host even knew the outlandish lengths he had to go through in order to stay out of their way, adding, “I thought it wasn’t a good moment to say, ‘Nice to see you. I was just put in a broom closet.'”
Watch Highmore discuss the broom closet debacle — and identify medical tools — in the clip above.
