'Girls5eva' star Renée Elise Goldsberry thought WikiFeet 'was invented for the show'

• Renée Elise Goldsberry "didn't know" what WikiFeet was before she started working on "Girls5eva" season two.
• "I thought it was invented for the show," the former "Hamilton" star said.

"Girls5eva" star Renée Elise Goldsberry told Insider during a joint interview with costar Sara Bareilles that she "didn't know there was such a thing as WikiFeet," the website database full of pictures of celebrity feet. "I thought it was invented for the show," she explained.

Her character, Wickie, is definitely aware of the site. In a storyline for the second episode of season two, which premiered Thursday, the singer has a personal crisis when she realizes that a paparazzi photo recently uploaded to the site exposed her "bad" foot that she'd been trying to keep hidden from her adoring fans for years.

"I'm going to admit that I have to spend some time when I get these scripts, actually trying to understand," Goldsberry said. "It's like, I don't know enough. I don't have enough pop culture references."

Goldsberry does have a WikiFeet page of her own, but said that "almost every encounter I have with a fan has been just a moment of them being uplifting to me," when asked about her most awkward fan encounter in real-life.

Bareilles, who plays Girls5eva member Dawn on the Peacock comedy, recalled a strange interaction she still feels guilty about.

"I do therapy weekly and I was on the phone and I was crying, but I was walking. I like to do it while I'm walking," the singer told Insider. "I'm crying on the phone and they're like, 'I'm a big fan. Can I get a picture?' I'm like, 'sir, I'm crying on the telephone right now. No, this is not a good time.'"

She said she spent the rest of her therapy session worried she "let this person down."

"I just wish I would've taken the picture. I felt terrible," she admitted.

"Girls5eva" showrunner Meredith Scardino said in a separate interview with Insider that she got the idea for the WikiFeet storyline because she has a "bad foot" herself.

"My son will be like 'Which foot is the one I can touch?'" she said.

"Wickie's character felt like the kind of person who would pride herself on her perfect WikiFeet rating," Scardino said, adding that she and the writers "ran" with the idea that the image-obsessed singer would be "rattled" if the secret of her bad foot came out.

"Girls5eva" season two chronicles the band's journey making an album on their own terms now that they're signed to a record label.

The first three episodes of "Girls5eva" season two are available to stream now on Peacock. New episodes are released weekly on Thursdays.