Liev Schreiber is sorry.
During an appearance on "Late Night with Seth Meyers," the "Ray Donovan" star, 59, apologized for a heated exchange he recently had with a reporter on the red carpet for his new Apple TV show "Nocturne."
"Mea culpa," he said. "I had a moment."
In a video published by TMZ on Oct. 21, Schreiber was seen scolding a reporter over her question on the "Nocturne" red carpet in New York, telling her to "talk to people like they're humans" instead of trying to get a soundbite.
On "Late Night," Schreiber explained the reporter, who he called a "lovely, charming" person, asked him to describe the show "in three words to a best friend quickly," which threw him off.
"I'm at that age now where I don't do things terribly quickly anyways,
but also the redundancy of 'three words' and 'quickly' completely stumped me, and I went off on some terrible tirade about monkeys and profanity," he said. "And I apologize. … I said something about, 'What kind of question is that?' And then I started swearing about monkeys and stuff."
Schreiber said, though, that they "got through it" and ended up having a nice chat about the show after he asked the reporter what about it interests her. In the video, the reporter maintained a smile throughout the conversation and appeared to take Schreiber's criticism in stride.
The reporter appeared to be working with Apple, the company behind Schreiber's show. In the original footage, the actor could be heard referencing the interview as being "in-house" and complaining that "three words isn't going to do anything for anybody."
The clip went viral and was picked up by a number of news outlets. On "Late Night," Schreiber acknowledged he "might not be the best person" to do interviews on a red carpet, and he noted his mother called him to confront him about the incident. "The first words out of her mouth when I answered the phone were, 'So what did you do?' As if I were in this kind of trouble all of the time," he joked.
Prior to the exchange, Schreiber said he was thinking about the idea of "reductive language," which he called one of his pet peeves, so the question touched a nerve. "We use emojis to speak now," he said. "We don't use words."
In "Nocturne," Schreiber plays a homicide detective who moves to a small Pennsylvania town that is terrorized by a serial killer, played by Stephen Graham. Zazie Beetz, Bill Camp, Rory Culkin and Chrissy Metz also star in the series, which premieres Oct. 30.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Liev Schreiber apologizes for 'tirade' against red carpet reporter
