Gisele Bündchen’s name has been in a lot of people’s mouths recently... except nobody is saying it right. The supermodel was a hot topic at Netflix’s roast of Tom Brady on May 5, where the NFL star was teased about his recent divorce from Bündchen. However, none of the comedians or celebrity guests actually pronounced Bündchen’s first name correctly. A resurfaced clip of the model explaining the true pronunciation of her name will throw most fans for a loop.
Back in 2005, Bündchen appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and spoke about how she had to resign herself to “the American way” of saying her name after moving from Brazil to New York as a teenager.
“My name in Portuguese is spelled G-I-S-E-L-E, but it’s Gisele-y. We say Gisele-y in Portuguese,” Bündchen explained, emphasizing the long “E” sound at the end of her name. “We say ‘I’ at the the end of the ‘L.’ Here, you eat the ‘I,’ you know, you only say ‘Gisele.’ This is the American way, I guess.”
The supermodel said that early in her career, she couldn’t get anyone to say her name correctly, so she just dropped the last syllable. “I’d go to castings and they’d say ‘What’s your name?’ I’d say, ‘Gisele-y.’ ‘What’s your name!?’ ‘Gisele-y.’ ‘What!?,’” Bündchen recalled. “I’d be like, ‘This is not a difficult name.’ So I’d just write it down and they’d be like, ‘Gisele.’ And I’d be like, ‘No, not Gisele. Gisele-y!’ So they could never say Gisele-y, so whatever, it was Gisele in the end. Call me whatever you feel like!”
At the time, Bündchen also shared a hilarious story about how her limited English led to a big misunderstanding. She recalled how she was living with a group of other models at the time, who turned out not to be very nice people. They taught her that “assh*le” was a term of endearment, which led to Bündchen nonchalantly using the word on her kindly doorman and even the people working at her agency.
Luckily, she was able to sort the “assh*le” issue out, but she still can’t get people to accurately pronounce her name.
