Billie Lourd is perfecting a fun family Thanksgiving “tradition” she inherited from her late grandmother Debbie Reynolds.
The American Horror Story actress, 26, revealed her unconventional family secret while on The Late Late Show with James Corden on Tuesday night.
“Cooking is a dangerous thing for me, I’m pretty inept in the kitchen,” Lourd said after host James Corden asked her what she planned to make for the holiday dinner.
“It’s kind of scary, it’s a dangerous time,” she joked. “So, what I do is lie, I bring something from a great restaurant and I put it in a sad little box and pretend like I did it.”
Lourd explained the lie had “become a family tradition vibe” and added, “my grandma used to do it.”
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“She did it really poorly. One year, she decided she was going to make everything and she said she was going to make everything,” she recalled. “[She] put [the food] out. My dad and I were serving the food on the plates and we were like, ‘This isn’t looking great.'”
Lourd continued: “And we checked under [the table] and it’s El Pollo Loco. At least put it in a different dish!”
While the actress wasn’t all that impressed with her grandmother’s lying skills — she was an Academy Award-nominated actress after all —Lourd said she was continuing the icon’s legacy.
“So, I do better and put it in a sad Tupperware so it looks like I did it,” she said.
Lourd lost both her grandmother and mother, Carrie Fisher, just one day apart from each other in December 2016.
The actress said working on Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story “saved” her life after the deaths.
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“I cannot thank Ryan enough,” she told Entertainment Tonight last week. “Honestly, it kind of saved my life. When Ryan offered me Cult, it was just a few months after my mom passed, and it honestly helped me process all of my emotions through these characters,” she explained.
“Being able to cry for [my character] Winter helped me cry for myself,” Lourd said. “And it’s been really healing and cathartic in an amazing way. It is heavy. We spend, like, 14 hours a day crying, and sometimes I go home and I will cry in my car for no reason because it’s like peeing.”
She added: “Once you break the seal, you can’t stop.”