Watch Dylan and Al revisit their on-air flubs that still make them cringe
When you’ve logged as many hours of celebrity interviews as Al Roker and Dylan Dreyer have over their years, there are bound to be a couple of awkward moments along the way.
But even though those moments have been few and far between, the 3rd hour of TODAY co-hosts had no trouble recalling the ones that still make them cringe.
Al kicked off a walk down regrettable-memory lane on Friday’s show, as he thought back to a moment that took place when he embarked on his cross-country weather forecasting journey, Rokerthon 2, in 2015.
Related: We all should be so lucky as to be surprised by the "Neighbors 2" star!
“If I had a thing to take back, it would have been (this),” he said. “We were doing Rokerthon, and it was the second to the last day — we’d been up like 26 hours, something like that. And Ryan Eggold comes on the train and surprised me.”
You know, Ryan Eggold, the star of “90210,” “The Blacklist” and “New Amsterdam”? Or as Dylan referred to him, the “friend of the show” who’s “been on a million times.” That Ryan Eggold.
However, what Al called him that day was “you!”
“I drew a blank,” Al admitted with a laugh. “I could not remember his name. So I’m going, ‘Hey!’ ... I was tired. I said, ‘You! Look, it’s you!’ And the control room knew I couldn’t remember, and they let me twist in the wind.”
But when it comes to embarrassment, he's in good company.
Dylan confessed that her cringiest moment was “the whole Zac Efron interview,” and for those who’ve never seen it, rest assured, she had a reason to feel that way.
“I would take it back, because I don’t know why I just played it so ...” She trailed off there as a clip from the 2016 interview rolled and showed her losing her train of thought back then, too.
It happened as Dylan spoke to Efron and his “Neighbors 2” co-star Seth Rogen, and then, as she gazed at Efron, she suddenly looked dazed, shook her head and added a quiet “sorry ... uh” before getting back on track.
“It’s so embarrassing!” she said Friday. “His arms were like busting out of his T-shirt, and I’m like, ‘I can’t focus!’ ... I wasn’t expecting to be that in awe!”
When the actor surprised her during a Facebook Live chat a few months after the incident, she told him, "It was the worst interview I've ever done in my life. ... You're very attractive. You caught me off-guard. And I didn't expect to turn into like a little 13-year-old girl tucking my hair behind my ears and totally forgetting my questions."
Efron’s take on the interview? “It was perfect!”
Al and Dylan were inspired to share their embarrassing moments after Oprah Winfrey’s recent visit to Rob Lowe’s podcast, "Literally," in which the TV titan revealed that she once asked Sally Field whether her then-boyfriend, actor Burt Reynolds, wore his toupee to bed. Field responded with a cold shoulder.
“It was like, ‘Whoa, Sally went cold on me on live TV,'” she told Lowe. “I deserved it, I deserved it, I deserved it, because that is such an inappropriate question.”
