Jessica Simpson as she revisits her infamous, on-air tuna gaffe — with 11-year-old daughter, Maxwell Johnson, by her side — in a new ad for Chicken of the Sea.
Twenty years after the singer/reality star/fashion mogul questioned whether she was eating tuna or chicken on Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica, a breakout moment that catapulted her to pop culture stardom and drew exasperation from then-husband Nick Lachey, she gamely revisits the topic for a brand campaign — and presumably fat paycheck.
Maxwell asks what she’s eating from the pouch and Simpson explains, “It’s called Chicken of the Sea, but it’s not really chicken. It’s tuna, so don’t get confused by it.” Her daughter replies, “Who would ever get confused by that?!” Simpson replies, “No one? Not your mom.”
A second clip sees Maxwell asking the question Simpson posed to Lachey when they were documenting married life for MTV in 2003: “Is that tuna or chicken?” When Jessica replies that it is confusing, the sage tweenager shoots back, “I’m joking. I know it’s tuna.” An embarrassed Jessica says, “Oh, me too.” Simpson wrote that she’s”still a @chickenoftheseaofficial gal” all these years later, as she shared a clip to social media.
While many stars would have distanced themselves from the original TV faux pas, putting it at the top of their publicist’s list of banned topics, Simpson — just 23 with big pop star ambitions — leaned into the bubblehead blond persona. While, yes, it was a “legitimate ditzy moment” — along with the Buffalo wings and “plata-ma-pus” mistakes — she acknowledged in her 2020 memoir Open Book that she “didn’t care if people made fun of me because we were pulling in nearly three million viewers a week” and selling her albums after she had been dismissed as a “Britney [Spears]-bot.”
