She took his love, and she took him down! Stevie Nicks didn’t just turn John Mulaney down when the comedian asked her to appear in his new Netflix variety special, she gave him a rejection he’ll never forget.
Several celebs appear in John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch, including Jake Gyllenhaal and Natasha Lyonne. But the Fleetwood Mac singer, 71, was the one who got away, as Mulaney, 37, said on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Monday, December 2.
“I wanted Stevie Nicks,” he said on the NBC late-night show. “She is a magical being, but when she passes on a TV project, she really passes on it.”
He explained that he wanted Nicks to sing a parody song on the special. “I was looking for her for a month. I can’t catch her — she’s a ghost in the wind, right? So I finally called her manager, and I said, ‘This is John Mulaney.’ And she went, ‘Oh, you’re that guy.’ And I went, ‘Yes, I am.’”
After that ominous start to the conversation, the manager told Mulaney that Nicks is on tour and only has limited time off, and the comedian replied that he completely understood. But the manager wasn’t finished.
“She said, ‘Also, Stevie listened to the song, and she doesn’t think it’s funny,’” Mulaney told host Jimmy Fallon. “And I said, ‘Oh, OK, the first answer was good enough.’ And she said, ‘Stevie’s confused because this is not one of her songs.’ And I said, ‘Oh, no, I know, it’s a parody song that she would be singing, but if she doesn’t like it and is not available…’ And she said, ‘Yeah, she doesn’t like it.’ And I started laughing really hard because this is the longest pass I’d ever heard in about a decade of entertainment.”
After a lot more back-and-forth, the Emmy winner finally threw in the towel: “I said to [the manager], ‘I’ve been passed on many times. This is the greatest pass in my career, and please thank Stevie for me, and just tell her I said hello, and basically, tell her I wrote the part because I wanted to hang out with her.’ And her manager said, ‘Well then, come hang out! We have people in the backyard all the time!’”
So is Mulaney going to head over to the singer-songwriter’s backyard? “I don’t know!” he exclaimed on the talk snow. “She didn’t like my song!”
John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch starts streaming on Netflix on Tuesday, December 24.
