Olivia Rodrigo Talks ‘Terrifying’ Stage Mishap, ‘Panic Attack’ During Border Interrogation on ‘Tonight Show’
Written by djfrosty on October 30, 2024
Olivia Rodrigo is likely still on a sugar high after wrapping up her sold-out 95-show Guts world tour. So, naturally, on Tuesday night (Oct. 29) when she visited the Tonight Show, host Jimmy Fallon asked her to talk about two of the wildest things that happened to her on the road.
After holding up a copy of the Touring Issue of Billboard magazine with Rodrigo on the cover, Fallon dug right in on the singer’s intense road run-in with some border cops. “I got in trouble with the law for the first time in my life,” Rodrigo admitted. “We were going from Canada to, like, Portland or something. We were at border control, I give them my passport, and they’re like, ‘OK, whatever.’ And they knock on the door and they’re like, ‘We need Olivia.’”
Thinking it might be a border agent wanting an autograph for their daughter, Rodrigo came out of her bus at 3 a.m. to see what the problem was. “I’m delirious, and they take me to a room—and it’s an interrogation room, and there’s like, a big cop [with] a gun,” she recalled. “He’s like, ‘Have you ever been arrested?’ I’m, like, ‘No, I haven’t been arrested.’ He’s like, ‘Are you sure?’ I’m like gaslighting [myself]. I’m, like, Oh, my God, maybe I was, like, arrested and I didn’t know it,” she said breathlessly.
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After being warned she could go to jail for lying to a federal officer, Rodrigo said she started to freak out, worrying she would not be let back into the U.S. “Like, I’m so scared. I’m, like, having a panic attack,” she said. After a 30-minute interrogation, the border agent looked at her again and asked her to spell her last name. “[I said] ‘Olivia Rodrigo, like, R, O, D, R, I, G, O,’ And he’s, like, ‘Oh, there’s a girl who looks just like you, that’s your same age, that’s been arrested multiple times, and her name’s Olivia Rodriguez.’”
Fallon also asked Rodrigo, 21, to run down some highlights of the tour, which she said included going to the Philippines for the first time, which was special for her due to her Filipino heritage. “Yeah, it was so special and everyone was so great. [And] such good singers!,” she said, remembering how her fans there sang all her lyrics back to her perfectly on pitch and in key.
Jimmy also just had to bring up one of the most embarrassing moments from the tour, a mishap in Melbourne, Australia where Olivia went crashing through a trap door in the stage. After playing the clip of Rodrigo handling the trip-and-fall like a pro, the singer said it was actually “really scary. Watching the video back is pretty terrifying. I mean, show must go on, that’s showbiz, baby.”
That said, Rodrigo said it was actually kind of a “beautiful” accident in hindsight because she had just been in the Philippines and she’d been thinking about her family and heritage and after getting shaken up by the fall she went to the hospital to make sure she hadn’t sustained a concussion. While there, she was treated by a Filipino nurse who had the same name as the singer’s grandpa, who passed earlier this year.
“And so I was like ‘wow that was him looking out for me,’” she said. “Making sure I didn’t get hurt and so I’m really happy it happened. I think it’s a beautiful story.”
Rodrigo also plugged her new Netflix concert special Olivia Rodrigo: GUTS World Tour and stuck around to play a fun game of “What’s Behind Me.”
Watch Rodrigo on The Tonight Show below.