A little bit shaken, but otherwise okay. America Ferrera got an unpleasant surprise at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday, May 16, when a man tried to crawl under her Georges Hobeika Couture dress as she walked the red carpet. The How to Train Your Dragon 2 actress kept her composure, but admits now that it was a bit violating.
“I don’t even know what happened!,” Ferrera, 30, said after the incident, according to Vulture. “I feel something behind me, and there’s this guy under my dress, and then two guys drag him away!”
She added to the site: “Of all of the things I prepared myself for, that was not one of them.” She joked, “It’s my first time in Cannes. It’s been quite an experience!”
At the time of the bizarre moment, Ferrera was posing for photographs next to costars Cate Blanchett, Jay Barachel, Kit Harrington, and Djimon Hounsou. Two others stepped in to take the man away, as Ferrera looked on in horror. Blanchett, who she just met that day, seemed to comfort her.
“If you’d asked me what my first experience at Cannes was going to be, I would not have imagined there would be dragons. I would not have imagined there would be, um, ankle biters on the carpet,” the Ugly Betty alum added to Vulture. “And, I will say, I’ll never, ever forget the feeling of when we came out of the screening. Walking out hand in hand with your cast—Cate Blanchett to my left, by the way, holding my hand—it felt like a crazy weird dream.”
“It’s the closest I could ever imagine coming to being crowned, like, Queen of England,” she said of the experience. “That’s what it feels like. It feels like there’s some amazing coronation and whatever.”