Lamorne Morris keeps throwing Jake Johnson under the bus for the New Girl reunion

“There will be no next season unless Jake Johnson decides that he wants there to be one,” Lamorne Morris declares of a potential New Girl reunion in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Johnson is the only holdout, Morris claims, and if the show moves forward “it’d have to be sans Jake Johnson, I don’t think he’s going to do it.” According to Morris, “he’s too expensive. His whole thing is, I gots to get paid. And we’re like, Jake, please just do it for the fans. And he’s like nope, I gots to get paid. Hopefully he changes his mind.”

For the entire press tour of Fargo, Saturday Night and beyond, any time the subject of a New Girl reunion came up, Morris made sure to pin the blame on his co-star: “Jake Johnson hates the fans, I guess,” he lamented on the Emmys red carpet. His remarks have caused a flurry of headlines and, perhaps, caused a few fans of the show to clutch their pearls… which was exactly what Morris was going for. 

Much like their New Girl characters, the stars of the show are masters of a bit—it’s just that Morris, with a few high-profile projects (and an Emmy win) under his belt, has a bigger megaphone right now. On his own podcast, Johnson said he’s been joking that “We’re all in but Lamorne won’t do the contract.” When fellow co-star Max Greenfield told Johnson that Morris had been pointing the finger at him, Johnson was surprised, but not shocked: “He and I are just constantly going after each other these days,” the Spider-Verse star laughed. The fake news has spread so far that New Girl creator Liz Meriwether “sent out a text and was like, ‘Lamorne, what are you doing?!”  

@heretohelppod Replying to @KayleeCorina ♬ original sound – We’re Here to Help Podcast

What he’s doing, as usual, is being very, very funny. But while Jake Johnson isn’t actually the one holding up the reunion, that doesn’t mean there’s one coming any time soon. As Morris reflects to THR, “the show got a lot of love, but it also got more love after it was done airing and we were on Netflix. It feels like people are appreciating it on a completely different level than before, and there’s a new generation of people who are discovering it. I still get asked all the time, when’s the new season coming out? People don’t realize we’ve been off the air for years.” Still, it sounds like he, at least, would be willing to sign the contract for a revival. “Hopefully Liz Meriwether is writing right now,” he says.