The 'Modern Family' star confessed his lacking celeb-recognition skills while appearing on 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show.'
Pop stars who meet Ed O'Neill might experience an unfamiliar reaction -- someone having no idea who they are!
The Modern Family star confessed his lacking celeb-recognition skills on Thursday's The Ellen DeGeneres Show, after the program's host shared a 2016 picture that Britney Spears took with the 71-year-old actor, who clearly had no idea who he was snapping a photo with, in the airport.
"The next day my manager sent me this, and said, 'There's 53,000 likes.' I said, 'Who is it?'" O'Neill revealed.
And apparently, the Britney moment may have had O'Neill singing "Oops... I Did It Again," as this has been a longtime issue for the TV star!
"Some years ago, I went to my favorite Italian restaurant in the evening. It was getting dark, I recognized a friend of mine. And there was a kid sitting next to him, with his wife, I assume," O'Neill recalled. "He was talking on his cell phone. I'm now talking to my other friend, and he says, 'Ed, would you say hello to my brother, he's a huge fan.'"
After saying a brief hello to the person on the other end of the line, O'Neill shared, "I hand the phone back to the kid and he gives me kind of a funny look."
The person who had handed him the phone: Randy Jackson. The brother: None other than the King of Pop, Michael Jackson.
"[I didn't say] 'I love your work', [or] 'You've had a wonderful career,' just, 'Yeah, hey, gotta go,'" O'Neill hilariously revealed.
And more recently, O'Neill AGAIN found himself dealing with an unfamiliar encounter.
"I went to Sarah Hyland's birthday party, and this beautiful young woman came up to me, and you know, when I go to these things, I don't look at people closely. It's a bit overwhelming," he said. "And I know she's famous, but I can't place her ... I text my daughter, Sophia, and said ... 'I desperately need to know the name.'"
It was Taylor Swift.
"She said, 'I'm having you committed,'" he said of his daughter's reply text. "I only see them when they're performing. So when you see them in the backyard... I'm old."
Hey... "Shake It Off," Ed! Happens to the best of us.
Watch his interview with DeGeneres below.
RELATED CONTENT:
