In July 2024 Rashida Jones sat down on TODAY to talk about “Sunny,” her new Apple TV+ series. Then the talk turned to her childhood, and Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager asked about a mark she’s carried for almost 40 years. Did she really have a scar? “Yeah,” she said. She got it when she was 9, and the story starts with her dad.
Rashida is Quincy Jones’s daughter, and she grew up in Los Angeles around some of the most famous people alive. Quincy met Michael Jackson on “The Wiz.” “He was maybe nineteen,” Rashida told The New Yorker that same month. “He was like a big kid with lots of animals.” Quincy went on to produce “Off the Wall,” “Thriller” and “Bad,” and Michael was often at the Jones house. “He was like a kid, so he was kind of like my dad’s son,” she said on TODAY.
“I remember we went to the set of the video, in Griffith Park,” she told The New Yorker about “Thriller.” “We were reading the storyboards, and right when we got to the part where he turns around and he’s a werewolf, Michael walked into the trailer with those crazy yellow eyes. Very scary!”
In January 1985 her father led the all-night session for “We Are the World” at A&M Studios. “No one was allowed to be in the room, but we were around before and after,” she said on TODAY. “I remember Michael was recording his solo.”
The scar comes from around that time, and from a friend who went almost everywhere with Michael. It was Bubbles, Michael’s pet chimpanzee. She told The New Yorker the whole story, and she started by owning her part. “I did antagonize him,” she said. “I was nine. He was in a cage, and he took my hairband out of my hand. Everybody else had left the room, and I was, like, ‘Give it back!’ He was playing with it and wouldn’t give it back to me. So I opened the cage, and he came out.”
Bubbles had the time of his life. “Then he started running around the room and throwing books,” she said. “A bit of a nightmare, now that I think about it.”
So she did what she’d seen the man in charge do. “I went up to him and was, like, ‘No! No!’ because I’d seen Michael say ‘No!’ to him,” she said. “And I slapped him on the head, just a light, little slap. And he took my hand like a sandwich and bit into it.”
She’d told it once before, on the Viceland show “Desus & Mero” in 2016. “You can see still,” she said, showing the mark on her hand. She also remembered what Bubbles had on: “a full little overall jumpsuit just trying to pretend he’s a human.”
Rashida Jones talks about growing up with Quincy Jones on TODAY (2024)
It’s TODAY’s official upload of her July 2024 visit. Her memories of Michael start at about 4:15, and the Bubbles question comes at 4:28.
Hoda and Jenna asked if she’d ever go see Bubbles again for a little closure. “No, I think we’re good,” she joked.
Rashida tells Jimmy Kimmel what it was like when Michael came over
It’s Jimmy Kimmel Live’s official clip. Kimmel asks what she remembers of Michael at about 3:11, and at about 4:00 she recalls him showing up with his boa constrictor and his chimp.
One memory from those years is all about her dad. “I remember watching the Grammys at home, and he won every single Grammy,” she told The New Yorker, talking about her dad’s big “Thriller” night. “I had so many ‘Thriller’ T-shirts and memorabilia. I don’t think I have any of that anymore.”