Lil Dicky admits to getting ghosted by celebrities who were supposed to shoot Dave

By the third season of Dave, Dave Burd, a.k.a. Lil Dicky, was scoring major celebrity guests: Usher, Rachel McAdams, Drake, Don Cheadle, and Brad Pitt were just a few of the A-list names to grace his set. But it wasn’t always so easy, Burd admitted on a new episode of Hot Ones. And though he wasn’t willing to fully spill the tea, it sounds like he got ghosted a few times on his FX comedy.

“To be clear, I’m not going to name names, but there are several instances where episodes have been written about a particular celebrity, oftentimes it ends up being a rapper, and they don’t show up on the day. And then I immediately have to totally reimagine, rewrite the scene on the spot, call someone else, hope someone else is in town,” Burd shared.

“I’ve had to bring $20,000 in a backpack for whoever shows up that day and then I left that backpack at catering at lunch. And then I was like, shooting another scene and I was like, ‘Oh my God! My $20,000!’ And I sprinted to go get my backpack, it was still there. And then an artist came and actually didn’t even charge anything,” the comic rapper recalled. “Anyways, it’s very stressful. I think it’s much easier as time goes on, like, season one, I’m having to convince… I’m like, ‘YG, trust me!’ Season three I’m like, ‘Brad, I know you’ve seen it.’ It gets easier as time goes on.”

FX recently announced that Dave was going on hiatus so that Burd could focus on his music (“I feel more hunger as a rapper than I ever have. I feel like I’m like 2010 all over again and just needing to prove myself,” he explained on Hot Ones). However, in its three seasons, the show was a pretty accurate reflection of his experience coming up in the music industry, right down to flubbing his Freshman Class Freestyle for XXL Mag.

“Truthfully, that was my experience in my XXL Freestyle. Like, I messed it up 25 straight times. I truly fucked it up,” he said of the 2016 installment, performed alongside Desiigner and Anderson .Paak. “I’ve never felt that much heat and humiliation and embarrassment. But eventually I got it right, and that was the one everyone saw.”

“If you look at the YouTube comments, everyone’s like, ‘Lil Dicky killed that!’ … Now they know. But that’s the power of editing,” he added. “And I wanted to speak to that. It’s okay to fail. And that failure caused hopefully strength moving forward. But you know, it’s not always gonna be all roses and glory. Sometimes you’re gonna fuck up 25 straight times in front of the guys you idolize.”