Rachel Bloom Politely Shuts Down Neil Patrick Harris’s Tonys Subtweet About Her

The 2018 Tony Awards almost went off without a hitch—unless you count the drama club drama that unfolded offscreen between Rachel Bloom and Neil Patrick Harris, when the backstage host and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend creator and at-home awards ceremony viewer got into an awkward exchange via Twitter.

If there’s one thing Bloom knows how to do during an awards show (besides win), it’s mixing fun with decorum while hamming it up on camera, so Bloom—in all of her earnest, grown-up theater kid glory—was backstage at the Tonys, interviewing presenters and award recipients while wearing a custom-made costume consisting of a top hat and a T-shirt complete with a cartoonish rendition of a very chill Stephen Sondheim smoking a joint.

While Harris live-tweeted the ceremony, he dismissively stated his confusion surrounding the supposedly unrecognizable top-hat-wearing woman backstage at the Tonys, and that his son Gideon “remarked that she says ‘like’ and ‘oh my god’ a lot.”

Bloom handled the subtweet like a champion, by quickly replying directly to Harris and reminding him that not only is she “a big fan” of his, but that they have actually met before on multiple occasions, as her husband Dan Gregor was a writer for How I Met Your Mother (the series that brought Harris back into the cultural consciousness, after years of being recognized as Doogie Howser) for half a decade. Bloom herself once even had a guest role on the show and shared a scene with Harris. After realizing his mistake, Harris responded to Bloom, thanking her for the “reminder” and inquiring about her backstage experience. Bloom did not respond, but she and her writers’ room tend to mine from personal histories for episodic drama, so we’re looking forward to a subtweet subplot on the next season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, perhaps in an episode that ultimately preaches the merits of having a private Twitter, or at least a Finsta.

Harris’s Tonys takedown did not stop at Bloom, either—he also took a jab at Bruce Springsteen, who won a Special Tony Award for Springsteen on Broadway, insisting that he did not understand the “logic” behind The Boss’s big Broadway win.

It remains unclear whether or not Harris was joking about not recognizing Bloom (and really, how could the creator and star of one of the few musical comedies on network television not be recognized by a fellow thespian), but one thing is for sure—this sort of spectacle is way more exciting than anything that would have gone down between these two at a high school drama club cast party.

Related: A Brief Visual History of Broadway’s Biggest Stars Hamming It Up at the Tony Awards