Hannah Simone says Prince joined ‘New Girl’ because of his crush on her

Prince’s guest appearance on New Girl may have had an ulterior motive.

The “1999” singer wanted to join the Fox sitcom because he had a crush on star Hannah Simone, the actress, who played Cece on the show, revealed on her rewatch podcast The Mess Around with Hannah and Lamorne. “The reason he wanted to do it is because he had a crush on our little Hannah,” costume designer Debra McGuire said. “Yeah. He tried for a very long time,” Simone confirmed. “He tried for a very long time to find a way to be in the same room together.”

The actress said that she had zero inclination to reciprocate Prince’s advances when he guest starred in the season 3 episode “Prince” in 2014. “I was not interested in that way,” Simone said. “Love a Prince song. Happy to put on a Prince record. I was not interested in anything else. So I was never in the same room with Prince. And then yeah, he was like a teenage boy who showed up at my job, which was really funny.”

Other New Girl cast members had previously said that Prince wanted to join the series because he was so invested in the show’s central simmering romance between Jessica Day (Zooey Deschanel) and Nick Miller (Jake Johnson). “[Prince] wanted to live in the reality of the show, and he wanted Nick and Jess to be together,” Johnson said on The Kelly Clarkson Show in 2022. “So, he said he’ll do the show if he could help them get together, and he got to live the whole fantasy.”

Simone said that the singer had a bizarre request to accommodate. “Apparently with people that he really likes to have that quality time with, he liked to play ping-pong,” the actress explained. “It was like 5 in the morning, they had to write in the tag [to play over the end credits], ’cause how were they going to incorporate ping-pong into the show? And they had to write this tag where Prince would get his request, which was: He wanted to play ping-pong with me.”

Simone said that filming the scene was somewhat tense. “They saved it as the last thing that we shot, cause they were low-key scared that if we shot that early, he would be — he’s Prince,” Simone explained. “So he could be like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna go now.’ And so we saved it for the end. And the thing that I’ll never [forget] is: I don’t play ping-pong, I’m not a good ping-pong player. I was so tired. It had been a 20-something hour day, and I just slammed the shot.”

Simone continued, “My body just went like, ‘We’re doing it.’ And then he was like — he genuinely did walk off, which was really funny.”

Prince played ping-pong with other notable figures, though it’s not clear if they were people in whom he had romantic interest. The musician challenged rival Michael Jackson to a game of table tennis (despite the “Smooth Criminal” singer saying he didn’t know how to play), taunting him with comments like “Come on, Michael, get into it” and “You want me to slam it?” before landing a shot directly into Jackson’s groin. “He played like Helen Keller!” Prince later said of his opponent. 

Jimmy Fallon also said that Prince once demolished him in a table tennis match at a private ping-pong club, and that the singer disappeared from the premises as soon as he claimed victory.

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Listen to the full conversation between Simone and McGuire above.