Mary Beth Barone and Benito Skinner have turned one of the internet’s most famous awkward interviews into a Halloween costume, recreating Dakota Johnson’s tense 2019 exchange with Ellen DeGeneres on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. The Ride podcast hosts shared their costume reveal on Instagram with the caption “The truth will set u free” — a direct nod to Johnson’s now-legendary line. In the original clip, Johnson corrected DeGeneres’ claim that she had not been invited to Johnson’s birthday party, replying: “That’s not the truth, Ellen.” The moment has gone down in pop-culture history, endlessly clipped, memed and quoted, and Barone and Skinner’s recreation was featured in W magazine’s Halloween roundup, updated on October 28.
A meme made wearable
The costume works because the reference is so specific. Barone and Skinner did not simply dress as Johnson and DeGeneres; they recreated a moment — the tension, the expressions, the line that everyone knows. It is Halloween as internet literacy test, and fans who recognised it instantly shared it widely. Skinner, who also appeared in a second Halloween look this year alongside Owen Thiele as Zara Larsson and PinkPantheress, has had a particularly busy spooky season. The double appearance underlines his status as one of comedy’s most online performers: fluent in memes, quick with a reference, and happy to turn a viral clip into a costume. For Johnson and DeGeneres, the moment remains a defining piece of talk-show history — proof that sometimes the most memorable television is the kind nobody planned. For Barone and Skinner, it was the perfect Halloween choice: funny, instantly recognisable, and, above all, true.
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