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Will Ferrell once asked a random audience member to sit on his lap during 'Tonight Show' interview

'Spirited' actor Will Ferrell had a complete stranger sitting on his lap during 'Tonight Show' interview

'Spirited' star Will Ferrell once had a very close interaction with an audience member on a talk show! While making an appearance in an episode of 'The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon', the Hollywood actor and Jimmy Fallon heard one audience member shouting "Slay" as a response to a Justin Bieber-related question regarding the sound a sheep makes. "Is that a thing? When you say 'Justin Bieber,' people go 'Baah'?" Ferrell asked, according to People magazine. In his response, Fallon shared that 'The Tonight Show' is "allowed to invite livestock to the show now." Throughout the entire episode, Fallon and Ferrell asked many audience members to make different animal sounds. At one moment, the duo referred to an audience member as "baby Bengal tiger."

Soon after, Ferrell jokingly said, "I wish we could hold that baby Bengal." Then, Fallon decided to fulfill his guest's wish by calling out the male audience member on the stage. "Want to sit on his lap? Sit on his lap, I guess," Fallon asked the audience member. The person ended up sitting in Ferrell's lap and even tried to act like a baby tiger for the next two minutes of the segment. The episode also showed Ferrell and the "Bengal tiger cub" doing an impersonation of a cat playing with a pen from Fallon's desk. As per E! News, Ferrell playfully remarked, "This is how they learn to hunt."

The audience member sitting in Ferrell's lap was completely in his character and he even made tiger claws with his hands and hissed at the two comedians. In the episode, Fallon even asked the audience member to 'be careful.' Later on, Fallon asked the man if he liked talk shows, and he responded by saying, "I do, yeah, yeah, yeah." After that, Ferrell sarcastically stated that the man taught the tiger how to speak English. "The scientific community is going crazy over this guy. They're going nuts. He's, like, one of a kind. Because I've had so many Bengal tigers and none of them could speak English. This is the first one," Ferrell further added. 

Before this particular episode on NBC, Fallon revealed on X (formerly known as Twitter) that the audience member who appeared in the segment was not a 'plant' from the late-night talk show. "For those of you watching the show tonight - the audience member that Will Ferrell turns into a Bengal tiger is not a 'plant' it's just Will's genius brain moving 90 mph. Thank you to our fans from Austria," Fallon wrote at that time.

For those wondering, Ferrell came on Fallon's show 'The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon' to promote his 2022 movie 'Spirited' which was simply a modern adaptation of Charles Dickens's 1843 novella 'A Christmas Carol.' Along with Ferrell, the musical comedy also starred Ryan Reynolds, Octavia Spencer, Sunita Mani, Patrick Page, Tracy Morgan, and Marlow Barkley. The film was released in limited theatres on November 11, 2022. At the moment, 'Spirited' is available for streaming only on Apple TV+.