Jeff Lewis ‘Celebrity Beef’ Episode Most Heated – Joel McHale Recalls Morning Martinis [Exclusive]
E!‘s Celebrity Beef host Joel McHale said none of the “celebrity beefs” on the show had true ire and resentment behind them, but he recalled that Jeff Lewis and Missi Pyle’s dispute was definitely on the spicier side.
Pyle had a bone to pick with Lewis when he shaded her acting “repeatedly” in the show Walk. Ride. Rodeo. Lewis and Pyle are (were) good friends and he claimed he was simply telling it “like it is.” Lewis then said, “If you want someone to blow smoke up your a**, then go do Andy Cohen’s show. And he can tell you how great you are.”
“This is why nobody likes you,” Pyle shot back.
… and there stood McHale, ready to facilitate this fun-filled cooking/conflict episode.
Joel McHale said Jeff Lewis and Missi Pyle were most heated on ‘Celebrity Beef’
“The Jeff Lewis and Missi Pyle episode was truly contentious,” McHale recalled to Showbiz Cheat Sheet while promoting Certified Angus Beef. “They were going at it. They’re good friends. But they were going at it. It was pretty funny. And so we left some of that in there, but we didn’t want their disputes to be real like, ‘You left me!’ We don’t want them to be like that.”
Instead, “We wanted them to be wonderfully silly, like Rachael Harris and Cheryl Hines is one where they go on vacation and Cheryl Hines will switch rooms four times … Which is maddening. And they were so funny,” he recalled.
Jeff Lewis leaned into the martini recipe instead of pasta
During the Jeff Lewis and Missi Pyle Celebrity Beef episode, McHale was often left standing there between the massive shade thrown between the two friends. McHale facilitated the various Celebrity Beef challenges, one that left Lewis riding a toy horse in honor of his Walk. Ride. Rodeo snark.
“Jeff, you will be forced to do your grocery shopping riding Shane,” McHale said because they named the toy horse. Pyle and McHale knew that Lewis’s kryptonite was that he doesn’t cook, instead, he orders out. So Lewis wrote the recipe to a pasta dish on his arm.
Meanwhile, as Pyle cooked away he concentrated on plying the judge (McHale) with alcohol. One recipe Lewis didn’t need to write on his arm was one for his famous dirty martini.
Jeff started drinking at 9 a.m. on ‘Celebrity Beef’
Celebrity Beef producers flashed Lewis’s blood alcohol level at some point during the episode as being “.05 = Game Impaired.” McHale said producers weren’t exaggerating. “I gotta hand it to him, he starts early,” McHale said about Lewis’s cocktail game.
“And they’re not deluded,” he said. At one point Lewis made a dirty martini for McHale. “It’s just basically gin. Just cold gin. Which actually is how I like my martini. But I don’t mind a dirty martini either. It wasn’t like we were there for two hours in the evening doing Celebrity Beef. We got there at 9 a.m., and he started drinking. To which I was like, ‘Well done. And you are a better man than I am.'”
Lewis dished in 2010 how he prepares the perfect martini. “I love a dirty martini,” he told US Weekly. “I use a little bit of water to dilute it, and I like fresh olive juice. I don’t like the prepackaged blue cheese olives, so we buy fresh blue cheese, and then I have [my assistant] Jett actually stuff the olives. But we don’t bring in food. We don’t want the extra calories — I’m trying to get the whole office to slim down.”
