Back one million years ago — that is, last December — the Internet came for Jason Sudeikis. Why? Because he punched Baby Yoda. The actor saw a dream come true: He got to appear in the Star Wars-verse. But it was a monkey’s paw kind of situation: He was playing the anonymous Stormtrooper that whacks the beloved Baby Yoda on the head during the first season of The Mandalorian. But it turns out Sudeikis forgot he committed that crime until the episode premiered and the incident went viral.
On a recent (remote) episode of Conan, the actor was talking with O’Brien about his and actress Olivia Wilde’s kids, specifically about showing their oldest child, Otis, some of his favorite age-appropriate movies. Sudeikis has shown him E.T. and the Star Wars movies. But he hasn’t yet shown him The Mandalorian, nor has he told him that his character did something that enraged the Internet.
Thing is, Sudeikis kind of forgot about his crime against the show’s most meme-able character. He says he shot the episode, then life just kind of carried on. It wasn’t until the episode dropped that he remembered what he’d done. Then one morning, as he was hanging with Otis, Wilde came in, informing him that he was trending on Twitter. Though he’s on Twitter, he’s not addicted to it, so this was news to him.
“Immediately I was like, ‘Wait, why?’” he recalled. “In today’s age, it’s like, ‘Wait, am I dead? Did I die? Am I cancelled? What’s happened?’” But he was being cancelled, sort of, at least for the time being. It took him a few seconds to put two and two together. “I had that moment like in the end of Sixth Sense or Ratatouille, where I’m like, ‘Oh, right!’ I should have been able to anticipate two-and-a-half months earlier, when Baby Yoda became the belle of the ball on the Internet. I totally forgot.”
But it all worked out in the end. The Internet mostly forgot about Sudeikis’ in-character transgression, moving onto, well, other, more serious topics. But it taught him what it feels like to have the internet gang up on you. “I know what Jim Gaffigan’s going through,” he joked, referring to the comic getting blowback over his epic anti-Trump tweetstorm. “I get it, I get it.”
You can watch Sudeikis’ chat with Conan O’Brien in the video above. The Baby Yoda business begins around the 3:27 mark.