The Masked Singer often feels like a hallucination, but for Miss Cleocatra, it almost was one.
“I was still on a little morphine,” Jenifer Lewis quipped to Us Weekly ahead of her unmasking on the Wednesday, April 24, episode. “And if you look closely, you’ll see the cat head goes, like, ‘What? What happened?’ I was stoned under the hat.”
Lewis, 67, says all of this with plenty of laughs, but she was recovering from a major health scare when she filmed her appearance on season 11 of the Fox competition series, having fallen from a 10-foot hotel balcony in 2022 while vacationing in Tanzania. She revealed in March that she couldn’t remember how to walk after the accident.
That was still the case when the Black-ish alum filmed her appearance on The Masked Singer, and her Miss Cleocatra costume was designed with that in mind.
“I was still on a walker when I did the show,” Lewis explained. “I suggested that they make me Cleopatra so I could be carried out on a barge, so I could have the throne and that the men could escort me — you know, the muscular men, Cleopatra. So they called back and they showed me the cat head and they said, ‘We’re going to make you Cleocatra.’ And girl, I laughed so hard. I thought it was hysterical. And it worked! It worked for me being able to disguise the fact that I couldn’t walk. … I had a good time.”
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The Masked Singer was actually one of the first projects she did following her recovery, in part because her friends thought it would be a fun way for her to get back in the game.
“My friends made me get out of bed,” she recalled, adding that she liked the idea of doing something purely stress-free. “That’s my career now. No stress, especially after the fall in Africa. Just show up, have some fun and give some words of wisdom when you can. End of story.”
It’s the same reason Lewis, a seasoned stage and screen vet, said yes to another off-the-wall project this year: Jennifer Lopez’s This Is Me … Now: A Love Story. Lewis played the Gemini member of the zodiac council who advised Lopez’s character, The Artist, on matters of life and love.
“She called and she really wanted me to deal with the mental illness aspect of what she was trying to relay to her audience,” Lewis explained. “And she had seen an interview where I talked about coming out of dark rooms and depression. Because you know, I have bipolar disorder, but I’ve been treated for many years and I really respected that. So, I showed up for her and it was a lot of fun. I mean, that costume alone, I was like, ‘What am I wearing? What is that about?’”
The Masked Singer, however, still stands out on a bright spot on Lewis’ résumé for its pure ridiculousness.
“My guess is it would be up there in the top five [weirdest things I’ve done],” Lewis told Us. “I’ve had some mishaps with costumes — a tit fell out once in front of an audience. I had a couple of things happen. Oh, girl, I could tell you stories. But yeah, Masked Singer‘s up there with a lot of them.”
The Masked Singer airs on Fox Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
