Ellen DeGeneres Tries to Scare Sarah Paulson Despite Social Distancing

Anyone who’s tuned in to Ellen DeGeneres’ show knows she loves to scare her guests. One of the hardest things for her during this pandemic (we’re guessing) has to be that she simply can’t do it in all the ways she has over the years.

The struggle had to truly be real on Wednesday’s episode as her guest was one of her all-time favorite scare victims Sarah Paulson. It’s no wonder the “American Horror Story” alum became the face of that franchise for so long. Her screams are incredible.

And they’re totally real, at least in the plethora of instances that Ellen has scared the bejeesuz out of her!

Ellen loves it so much, she basically figures out a way to work a jump-scare into every one of Sarah’s appearances on her show, and even introduced her to this show by showing a minute-long montage of some of her best scares … and Sarah’s most epic screams.

Unfortunately, social distancing and quarantine protocols make it difficult to coordinate scares, though she could always send producer Andy Lassner over to her guest’s houses to spook them from outside. Of course, that could go horribly wrong in so many ways.

Plus, Andy was doing a great job of spooking Sarah just by looming behind Ellen outside her windows during the interview. It got to where Sarah just let him have it until he walked off; the banter between these two was hilarious throughout the interview.

The actress was in fine form, cracking jokes and showing off her comedic chops throughout the interview, but her jokes about Cate Blanchett didn’t land quiet as hard as she may have liked.

Joking about promoting their Hulu project “Mrs. America” together, Sarah talked about how Cate doesn’t have a social media presence at all.

“So she’s going to try and piggyback on my social media so she can get a little bit of attention for herself, which is nice,” she said to a flat look from Ellen. But Sarah doubled down to really try and nail the joke, adding, “I’m looking forward to helping Cate become more successful. I think that’ll be a good thing to do.”

It didn’t work (Sarah blamed the lack of audience).

It didn’t help that she was far funnier, to Andy in particular, with her total inability to figure out how to pronounce GIF and barely knowing what Instagram is. She may be on social media, but she clearly doesn’t completely get it.

Sarah also showed her incredible skills at mimicry by sharing the heartbreaking sound her adorable new puppy Winnie makes when it sees other dogs while out and about.

She said she was advised to socialize her new dog with 100 people in 100 days when she picked her out last month, which just seems like irresponsible advice during a pandemic. So of course, that’s advice Sarah opted to ignore.

Aside from being incredibly easy to scare, Sarah describes herself as a “nervous person” and added that she’s a germaphobe on top of it. That means she’s taking COVID-19 very seriously, but she also thinks it has its advantages.

“I get frightened by a lot of things, so I’m the gal you want around during the pandemic because I can answer a lot of questions about what to do when you’re afraid, and I know how to clean very well. I’m a great cleaner, always have been,” she said. “So see, I’m ready!”

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