Bill Hader's First Acting Job Was on 'Punk'd' But He Insists He Was 'Not Very Good'

'I was not very good,' the current Emmy nominee said of his short-lived stint on MTV

This is not a joke: Bill Hader was on MTV’s Punk’d. And he wasn’t exactly the best.

“I was a correspondent,” the Emmy-nominated Barry star, 40, tells PEOPLE Editor-in-Chief Jess Cagle’s The Jess Cagle Exercise of his first paid acting gig. “I did one episode because I was not very good.”

During that 2005 episode, Hader pranked Ashlee Simpson and made her cry.

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Austin Hargrave

“It was an art gallery and it was my dead brother’s artwork,” he explained on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen earlier this year. “She put her jacket down and somehow the jacket caught on fire and set off the sprinklers and it ruined all the artwork. So we actually flooded this art gallery, and then I had to come out all wet, holding this artwork, like, ‘Look what you did!’”

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That “not very good” performance wasn’t Hader’s only admission during the episode of The Jess Cagle Exercise. He also revealed the item he stole from the Saturday Night Live set.

“I have one of Stefon’s shirts,” he confesses.

The 70th Primetime Emmy Awards, where Hader is nominated for Best Actor in a Comedy for his turn in HBO’s Barry, air Sept. 17 on NBC.

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