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Taylor Lautner thought Kanye West interrupting his then-girlfriend Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards was a "rehearsed skit".
During the infamous moment, the singer was in the middle of her acceptance speech for Best Female Video when the rapper stormed the stage, took her microphone and declared that Beyoncé had one of the best music videos of all time.
In a recent episode of The Squeeze With Taylor Lautner & Taylor Lautner, the Twilight star's podcast with his wife, the actor recalled how the incident looked from where he stood on the stage behind Swift and West.
"I was unaware that the Kanye thing was not a skit," he revealed. "So I gave her the award, I took five steps back, and was standing five feet behind her. In the middle of her giving her thank you speech, Kanye jumps up onto 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 and interrupting Taylor Swift? It just didn't make sense."
The 30-year-old, who dated Swift for several months in 2009, acknowledged that he can be seen laughing at West's stage invasion, and insisted that he just assumed the skit was really funny - until he saw the look on Swift's face.
"If you look back at it, I'm actually caught like laughing, giggling at him, like, 'I can't hear them, but this is probably really funny right now.' He jumped off, she finished, the second she turned back around and I saw her face for the first time, I was like, 'Oh... that wasn't good.'"
Beyoncé ultimately won Video of the Year for Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It) and invited Swift onstage to give her acceptance speech uninterrupted.
The VMAs marked the beginning of Swift and West's long-running feud, which came to an end around 2016.