Will Ferrell and Stephen Colbert recently reminisced about Nicole Kidman‘s bewitching ability to make movies better.

The Anchorman star and the Late Show host celebrated the 20th anniversary of Nora Ephron‘s movie Bewitched, which they starred in together alongside the Babygirl actress. The film follows the fictional production of a reboot of the TV series Bewitched starring an actor (Ferrell) and a real-life witch (Kidman). Colbert played one of several writers for the fictional sitcom.

“It was a lot of fun,” Colbert recalled. “I was there for 52 days, and I think I showed up for 45 seconds of the film.”

“That was a long shoot — 75 days, I believe,” Ferrell said. “We needed it, though. We needed all those days,” he added sarcastically. 

Colbert jogged Ferrell’s memory about a key scene — a meet-cute between the two leads that happens on the set of the show-within-the-movie. “Nicole Kidman’s over there across the studio, and me and all the other people playing the writers are at video village ‘watching’ the first scene,” Colbert recalled. “And you, Will Ferrell, go to play Darren to go be in the scene with Nicole. And when the scene’s over, do you remember what you came and said to us?”

Ferrell didn’t remember any specifics, so the host described the events from his recollection. “You came over to us because when the scene started, and when Nora Ephron called action, we saw why Nicole Kidman was a movie star,” Colbert said. “Because the moment she called ‘action,’ she flipped some switch. She became the most alluring and beautiful woman — she’s a beautiful woman, but something preternatural happened, and we did the scene, and all of us are in, like, a fever of desire for the character that she’s playing.”

“We can’t even barely breathe, and none of us are saying [it] to each other, ’cause, like, that’s a weird feeling to have on a set,” he continued. “And you walked over and you went: ‘What the f— just happened out there?’ And we all went, ‘I don’t know.’ And you went, ‘I couldn’t remember any of my lines! I couldn’t get out of her eyes! What the f— just happened?’ It was extraordinary. She literally glowed from the inside.”

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Ferrell confirmed Colbert’s account. “It was like an alien being had come and told us, ‘Everything is gonna be okay,'” he recalled.

Colbert also reenacted Kidman’s bizarre farewell to him on set, in which she continuously moved her strong grip all over his arms. “She walked away, never touched my hand, and I just stood there looking down at my arm,” he remembered. “And then there was a grip holding a light, and he goes, ‘Guess that’s how Nicole Kidman says goodbye.'”

Ferrell offered a hypothesis for Kidman’s hand movements. “I remember she told me she did learn how to do massage,” he said. “I swear to God. I don’t know if it was during [the movie], but she had learned to do massage techniques, just as a, I dunno, enrichment? So maybe she was just sensing the tension through there.”

Bewitched ultimately grossed $131 million on an $85 million budget, and holds a score of 23% from critics and a 28% approval rating from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes.

“Ask Nicole Kidman about the pantheon, the body of work — she always lists Bewitched as number one,” Ferrell joked, suggesting that he’s totally aware of the movie’s negative reputation.

“We had [Kidman] on — she was sitting right there. I said, ‘We were in a movie together! We were in Bewitched,'” Colbert recalled. “And she went, ‘What? You were in Bewitched?'”