Ellen DeGeneres, once a household name, was known for pulling the ultimate pranks on her celebrity friends. In January 2015 she also scared the living daylights out of fellow talk show host Jimmy Fallon when she sneaked up on him inside a bathroom. Recalling the terrifying incident on his show, Fallon exclaimed, “You scared me. It was so weird. You were hiding in a bathroom…you were crouching like a little kid, hiding behind a thing. And I walked in, and you went, whoa.”

Fallon shared that he was tricked by DeGeneres’s crew. He recalled, “Ellen has a picture of you as you hung up in the bathroom. I go, oh, someone’s going to scare me. And they go, no, no, no, we’re not. And then you had the hidden cameras.” DeGeneres in response, chided Fallon for revealing her scare tactics on live TV. She joked, “And now you gave away how we scare people. Now I have to have a different tactic to get people into the bathroom. Because that’s how we get them in, Taylor Swift. We got everybody.”

DeGeneres added, “That was a last-minute thing because we were going to scare you during the show. And I thought, well, we’ve got to throw him off. I’ve got to scare him first before the show starts so it’s out of the way. So that was just a fake out. That wasn’t even to scare you.” She stressed, “I’m so cruel. I don’t like doing all this.” As the episode aired, viewers chimed in with their two cents. “Ellen was gonna scare Jimmy on his own show. That would have been hilarious!!” a fan wrote on YouTube. “Thanks to Ellen he doesn’t even feel safe on his own show lol,” echoed another. Meanwhile, one noted, “I am the only one who was expecting Jimmy to scare Ellen?”

Jimmy Fallon and Ellen DeGeneres at Rockefeller Center on September 8, 2015, in NYC. (Image Source: Getty Images| Photo by Laura Cavanaugh)
Jimmy Fallon and Ellen DeGeneres at Rockefeller Center on September 8, 2015, in NYC. (Image Source: Getty Images| Photo by Laura Cavanaugh)

In 2019, DeGeneres pulled the same prank on Taylor Swift by having her head to a fake dressing room. Swift was terrified beyond her wits. “Yesterday Taylor Swift was here on the show, and I love doing this. We sent her to a fake dressing room, where I was hiding. We put some hidden cameras and told her to go look at something in the bathroom,” DeGeneres explained on her show, narrating the jumpscare. “And I scared her,” the talk show host laughed as the video played for the audience.
A throwback clip of the same, on DeGenere’s Halloween special, still had viewers in splits years later. “Taylor was right…Ellen’s laughter is even funnier than watching Taylor fall for the prank,” a fan opined. “Still the best scare reaction,” argued another. In a similar vein, one joked, “And that is called ‘rolling on the toilet floor laughing.’”