James Corden Breaks Deafening Silence on That Face He Made at the Royal Wedding

James Corden had a little explaining to do. The late night host had spent the weekend in his native England as one of the 600 guests at Prince Harry’s and Meghan Markle’s very well-televised wedding and he was a bit worried that the look on his face, broadcast around the world, gave people the wrong impression. You see, Corden wasn’t annoyed by the ceremony at St. George’s Chapel on Saturday—he was trying not to sneeze at a very inopportune time.

When Corden returned to the set of The Late Late Show on Monday night, he got down to setting the record straight. “The worst part of the ceremony for me was there was flowers everywhere, the most beautiful flowers you’ve ever seen,” he explained. “And I get quite bad allergies if I’m in such close proximity to flowers, so for a lot of the ceremony, I just needed to sneeze.”

While sneezing during a wedding can be excused, since it’s a wholly natural and difficult to avoid phenomenon, sneezing when the archbishop is asking if anyone objects to the couple’s marriage could be considered a breach of etiquette. “Right at the point when the archbishop was saying, ‘If anyone knows of any reason…’ and I was like, ‘Please don’t sneeze. Please don’t sneeze,’” Corden said. “I had to do one of those internal sneezes.”

“I think I got away with it,” he added. Watch the tape and see for yourself. The moral of this story is that if you are prone to hay fever, the next time you attend a royal wedding, take allergy medicine first.