Prince was “hands-down” the coolest celebrity New Girl creator Liz Meriwether worked with on the hit Fox sitcom—though she clarified that they did “have Taylor Swift as well, which was incredible.”
“We were doing night shoots in Altadena, and I was in another dimension because I hadn’t slept,” she told Obsessed: The Podcast. “And he, in the middle of the night, just looked at me and kind of beckoned me into a dark bathroom; he turned all the lights off. It was just Prince and me in a dark bathroom. And then he flicked on a flashlight under his chin. He was like, ‘This is funnier, isn’t it?’”
The music legend, who died in 2016 at 57, appeared in a 2014 episode of New Girl as himself, inviting Jess (Zooey Deschanel) and Cece (Hannah Simone) to a party at his L.A. mansion, where shenanigans and strangeness ensue.
When he pulled her into the bathroom on set, Meriwether didn’t realize he was pitching her ideas due to the unconventional nature of the interaction. But once she caught on, she knew the sequence would end up in the show.
“But for a while I was like, ‘Am I walking into Narnia? Is there a different dimension in this bathroom that I’m going to walk into and live in whisperings? Do I live in a different world?” she recalled.
The Season 3 episode came at the end of a rocky period for New Girl’s ratings. Prince himself, a devout New Girl fan, asked to be on the show after turning down an earlier offer from the New Girl team. They had asked if he wanted to be the celebrity Cece loses her virginity to, which was purportedly too racy.
But then Deschanel received an email in her inbox reading, “Hello, I am the manager for the legendary artist Prince, and he wants to be on New Girl.” Deschanel thought it was a prank, and forwarded the email to her agent for verification.
Meriwether was especially amazed at Prince’s rigor when it came to the story and script. His care for the process inspired her, as did his attention to detail. In the end, she concluded that his thoroughness wasn’t necessarily surprising—he was a global superstar, after all.
“He went through every line of the script with me, and he didn’t have to at all,” she said. “I mean, he could have just showed up and literally not done anything and it would have been fine, and instead he threw himself into it and cared. That was the other huge takeaway for me because I was like, ‘That’s how you get to be Prince: that you care that much, that you work that hard, that you are that thoughtful and love it—love the work. You could tell he was kind of feeding off of getting a chance to dig in.”
Twelve years later, Meriwether still sometimes feels disbelief about the whole endeavor.
“It doesn’t feel real,” she said. “I think, because we were shooting all night, it does still feel to me like, ‘Did I dream that? If we hadn’t filmed it, I would be like, ‘That’s something I made up in my head about my life.’”
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