The Golden Globes’ Pianist Holds Nothing Against Michelle Yeoh, Whom She’s A ‘Super Fan’ Of

Awards shows can provide plenty of drama, as Will Smith certainly proved at last year’s Oscars ceremony. But it’s not always the boldfaced names collecting the golden statuettes who are the center of the action, as pianist Chloe Flower discovered earlier this week during the Golden Globes broadcast.

As The Daily Beast explained, Flower was hired to draw the audience back into the show with a little live piano playing whenever the broadcast returned from a commercial break. A piano also played whenever a winner’s speech began to go over the allotted time, but in those cases it was a pre-recorded track, and not coming from Flower. Which nobody realized.

As a result, the pianist became the source of much ire throughout the night whenever a celebrity’s Golden moment was interrupted by the sounds of a piano playing.

When it was Austin Butler’s turn to get played off — just before he dedicated his award to his late mother — he suggested that “you could at least play ‘Suspicious Minds.’”

Colin Farrell simply said “you can forget that piano!,” as he was only just getting started.

But it was the indomitable Michelle Yeoh, who was named Best Actress for Everything Everywhere All at Once, who really took it to the next level. “Shut up, please,” she said when the music began to play her off. “I can beat you up, ok? And that’s serious.”

Flower took to Twitter — where she was a trending topic — to explain that it was not her you were hearing. And host Jerrod Carmichael also explained that it was a pre-recorded track.

Flower reiterated that point in her interview with The Daily Beast, where she explained that her job was simply to perform live when coming back from commercial breaks — and that was what she did. “I would never play during someone’s speech,” she said. “I’m not a producer, I’m an artist. So I’m not concerned with time. I just would never do that. That’s not something that I would feel comfortable doing, and it was never something that was asked of me. So that is setting the record straight, I hope.”

As for having Yeoh threaten to kick her a**? That was cleared up, too. As Flower explained:

It’s funny because the winners’ portraits were happening right next to the piano, so a lot of the winners had to walk past me in order to take the portrait. And I stopped Michelle on her way to the portrait and I told her, “I would never play during your speech. I was not playing.” And we held hands, and she was really nice and gracious, and it was totally fine. And Austin, I did the same. I spoke to Austin. I didn’t speak to Colin. I didn’t speak to Eddie [Murphy]…

I think in the moment when you’re on stage… I don’t take it personally because they’re trying to say thank you, and I don’t feel like it was directed at me, you know? And it’s the first time in the history of the Globes that you have a live musician, so it just automatically gets directed to me because I’m the one there. There’s no face to the sound people [backstage]. So I became the face of that, unfortunately. But I didn’t take it personally.

Flower also admitted that when Yeoh won, “I was clapping harder than anybody. I was like, screaming from the piano, kind of unprofessional… I was just so happy for her. I still love her, I’m still a super fan of Michelle Yeoh. I respect her so much as an artist, as a person. I think she’s an amazing actress.”

(Via The Daily Beast)