Taylor Swift might go “Back to December,” but Taylor Lautner wants to go back to the 2009 VMAs.
On an episode of his new podcast “The Squeeze” that he hosts with his wife, Taylor Dome Lautner, she asked him, “If you could go back to one moment in your life, what moment would that be and what would you say to yourself?”
“Probably the 2009 VMAs, when I presented the award to Taylor and was unaware that the Kanye [West] thing was not a skit,” said Lautner, 30, to which his wife, 25, quipped in response, “I’m deceased.”
Lautner — who was dating Swift, 33, at the time — was referencing the now-infamous moment when Ye, 45, interrupted Swift while she was in the middle of accepting her award for Best Female Video for “You Belong With Me.”
“Yo, Taylor,” Ye said during the interruption. “I’m really happy for you. I’ma let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!”
Lautner had originally thought the whole thing was a comedic bit.
“I presented the award to her,” he recalled on the podcast. “I took five steps back and was standing five feet behind her. And, yeah, in the middle of her giving her ‘thank you’ speech, Kanye jumps on the stage.
“I can barely hear it. I can’t see them — I’m just assuming that this whole thing was a practiced and rehearsed skit because why else would Kanye West be jumping up on the stage, interrupting Taylor Swift?” Lautner continued.
He admitted he laughed about it at first, but when Swift turned around and he saw her face, he knew it “wasn’t good.”
Swift and Lautner briefly dated in 2009, and Dome pointed out that the two had just gone public with their relationship at the time of the incident.
Lautner and Dome married in November 2022 in California after a yearlong engagement.