Punk'd was one of the most iconic TV shows of the noughties. I mean, was there anything better than watching Ashton Kutcher prank celebs and shake them to their core?
But one of the most asked questions about the show is how it all went down behind the scenes and what footage didn't make it into the final cut.
Well, appearing on the most recent episode Hot Ones, Ashton himself opened up a little about the show, revealing how they persuaded celebs to let them air the footage and how much money the show lost in a single episode because a prank didn't go to plan.
"We never aired a single episode that a celebrity didn't sign a waiver to say, 'It's OK to air this," Ashton said after being asked about paparazzi invasion and celebrity privacy.
In fact, Ashton revealed that he'd often show celebs the final product in order to get their permission and air what had been filmed.
When Hot Ones host Sean Evans asked what would happen if a celebrity started to rumble the prank, Ashton revealed the two tricks he'd use to keep the whole thing alive.
The first was to fall back on the initial plan and then insert somebody else into the scenario so the celeb wouldn't guess that something was off.
The second route was to just keep the prank going for as long as possible so the mark would begin to think that it would be impossible for the scenario to be fake.
However, things couldn't go exactly to plan all the time and if the prank failed, it meant the show had spent a ton of money on nothing. The biggest loss in a single episode? $300,000...
"I can't remember exactly, but I wanna say that there was a special effect that was supposed to go off," Ashton recalled. "We couldn't get it to trigger, and there was no way to do it. So we had to just pull [the plug]."
You can watch Ashton's full interview on Hot Oneshere.
