“I’m still shocked,” Jennifer Lopez told Ryan Seacrest on his radio show Friday morning after Pia Toscano‘s surprise American Idol elimination Thursday night.
“I don’t know what happened. Maybe people thought she was safe, as I did. I thought she’d be around to the top 5, maybe even the top 2. She was one of the most talented singers that we had.”
Afterward the on-air announcement, Lopez went to the stage to talk to the just-eliminated contestant to offer some consolatory advice. “I was just trying to let her know that we were pushing her every week because we thought she was one of the ones that was safe. In this business, there’s always doors that have been slammed in your face. I’ve had tons of doors slammed in my face. I told her to stay pure in her heart, to have faith and to know that if this wasn’t the path for her, that there was something bigger for her. And I believe that.”
But, it may have been Lopez who needed the consoling. “I was shaking,” she said of hearing the news. “I sat in the trailer afterwards and I was like ‘I still can’t believe that Pia got voted off at number nine.'”
Lopez also shared her thoughts on the other American Idol news of the night, Iggy Pop’s shirtless rendition of Real Wild Child (Wild One). “Wow!” She told Seacrest. “Alrighty. It was a big moment for me that I’ll always remember, very close up like that.”
