Anderson Cooper still cringes when he thinks about dancing on stage with Madonna at New York’s Barclay Center years ago.
The CNN anchor told friend Kelly Ripa he’d rather “forget” his appearance at the “Lucky Star” singer’s 2015 concert, where he was pulled on stage to get spanked and gyrated on.
“I loved the whole idea. I loved the experience,” Cooper explained to listeners of Ripa’s “Let’s Talk Off Camera” podcast on Wednesday. “But I don’t love the video that exists of it.”
Though the reporter said fellow concertgoer Ripa warned him what the act entailed beforehand, he “didn’t expect” things to get so spicy.
“I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” he said. “I was terrible. I danced terribly. It was mortifying.”
Cooper remembered Madonna spanking and humping him before provocatively being given a banana.
Disoriented, he said, “I open it up, and I start to peel it and eat it. 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 before begging listeners not to look up the clip, “To this day, I don’t know what happened.”
At the time, the journalist was a little more excited about the experience, afterward taking to Facebook to rave about his “amazing night Madonna concert.”
Years later, the Queen of Pop poked fun at her friend Cooper’s awkward stage presence during a December 2017 episode of “Live With Kelly and Ryan.”
“I want to talk about something that you weren’t good at,” Madonna said, putting Cooper on the spot. “I’ve danced with you at nightclubs [and] you were very free and cool. And then when you got on stage, I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’”
Cooper may have a chance to redeem himself in the near future, however.
The “Lucky Star” singer will resume her Celebration Tour in London in October. Over the summer, she was forced to postpone the tour after a serious bacteria infection sent her to the hospital.
Listen to Ripa and Cooper’s “Let’s Talk Off Camera” episode here. The Madonna story begins around the 31:40 mark.