By Page Six | Created at 2026-07-21 19:23:06 | Updated at 2026-08-08 11:56:23
2 weeks ago
Jerry O’Connell would purposefully annoy his ex Giuliana Rancic when he bumped into her at the gym.
“I would see Giuliana sometimes at Equinox, and I do this really funny thing. Everybody should do this with exes. It’s really funny,” he said on Monday’s “Let’s Talk Off Camera” podcast with Kelly Ripa.
Instead of trying to avoid an awkward interaction with his ex, the host said he chose to “walk right up” to her “nose to nose” and pretend to flirt with her.
The actor reenacted what he would say to Rancic, which was tell her how “weird” it was to see her and say things like “I miss you” in an over-the-top voice.
“It would annoy her so much,” he proudly said with a smirk. “She would be like get the f—k away.”
He admitted that the more it would annoy Rancic, the more he would play into it.
“She would be like, ‘Go away. Stop it.’ And I would be like ‘Oh gosh I miss you. Do you have the same number?'”
The reporter and the “Stand by Me” star dated between 2003 and 2004.
In her memoir “Going Off Script,” Rancic famously accused O’Connell of brutally breaking up with her over an intercom.
In the 2015 tell-all, Rancic claimed her then-boyfriend told her, “Nope, sorry, homegirl. Things change, but you take care, OK?”
During Monday’s podcast, O’Connell admitted he doesn’t “recall [his] exact wording” during their 2004 split.
“I can’t deny that I said that,” the “Jerry Maguire” actor confessed. “It doesn’t sound like something I would say, but again, if I was writing a memoir, it made for a good quote.”
He also said that he was a “terrible boyfriend” to the journalist throughout their relationship.
“[Another woman] was inside my condominium. … Giuliana Rancic wanted entry into my condominium. Thank goodness, buzzer, gate, security. I paid a pretty hefty homeowners’ fee for these things. Cameras and everything.”
“I said, ‘I did not know you were coming. You can’t come here unannounced,’” he recalled. “Notice no one had a key, so the relationship was not like that. There was no warning, and I didn’t want someone coming in because I didn’t want any confrontation.”
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