Anyone who’s spent a minute with Mike Myers’ satirical new series The Pentaverate knows that it’s chock full of Easter eggs, references and special guest cameos. (What’s up, Jeremy Irons!) 

One of the show’s most playful in-jokes comes courtesy of Noovie host and longtime TV correspondent Maria Menounos. In The Pentaverate, Menounos plays a sort of souped-up version of herself. She’s somehow trapped by the global organization of the title and forced to host a fluffy news show just for them — still exuding the perky Menounos persona that moviegoers across the country have come to know and love. 

Myers tells Tudum that, when it came to deciding whom he wanted in the show, the question was never “Why Maria Menounos?” but rather “Why not Maria Menounos?” Being in the entertainment industry as long as he has, Myers says, “you start to remember the classiest people that you deal with.” And Menounos is, in Myers’ words, “one of the nicest people I’ve ever met in show business,” as well as one of the sweetest, making some of what she gets to say in The Pentaverate all the more jarring. “I didn’t know whether she would say yes,” he recalls, “but she did, and she knocked it out of the park.” 

Ask Menounos, though, and she’ll tell you that she was always going to say yes. She was in the midst of a particularly difficult time in her life — she’d just found out that her mother’s brain cancer was terminal. That’s when she got a call from one of The Pentaverate producers asking if she’d be in the show. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, this is so amazing,” Menounos tells Tudum, continuing, “I was like, ‘God, thank you for this little gift right now to just brighten my day.’ And not a little gift, either, by the way!”

Menounos recalls how, the very next day, she got a surprise call from Myers, who told her he’d written the role with her in mind and that it would be his honor if she would consider joining the production. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? I’ll get your coffee. I’ll do your errands. I’ll be your assistant for whatever you want,’ ” she says. “That just shows what a beautiful human [Myers] is. I have a teensy role in this show. He didn’t have to call me and personally reach out, but that’s the kind of thing that, I think, elite, beautiful humans do.” 

Menounos says the next time she got a call from Myers, it was to tell her that he’d seen cuts of the show — and that she was hilarious. “I was like, ‘I’m going to die now,’ ” she says. “Now, anytime I’m cranky, my husband tells me, ‘Mike Myers personally called you to tell you that you are freaking funny. You cannot complain about anything ever again.’ ”