Will Arnett shut down his podcast co-host Jason Bateman after being asked what he appeared to view as an overly personal question about his past marriage to Amy Poehler.
During Monday’s (June 22) episode of SmartLess, the Arrested Development actor pushed back when Bateman steered the conversation toward a private topic involving Poehler, Arnett’s former wife and the mother of his two sons, Archie and Abel.
The exchange came as the longtime friends were chatting in the loose, often candid style that has helped make the podcast one of the most popular celebrity interview shows in the comedy space.
Bateman first seemed to realize the moment might be going too far, acknowledging the public nature of the show.
“What are you talking about?,” he responded, after the Ozark star admitted he ‘forgot people listened to this’.
“Did you ever poo in front of Amy?” Bateman, 57, asked during Monday’s (June 22) episode.
Arnett quickly challenged the question, suggesting Bateman might be fishing for attention and criticizing the lack of boundaries.
“Are you trying to get something that we can click around?” Arnett said, questioning what kind of ‘manners’ the actor had.
Bateman then followed up, asking whether the couple had ever been in the bathroom in front of one another during their marriage.
Arnett made it clear he found the line of questioning out of bounds and repeated the premise back in disbelief.
Clarifying the ‘outrageous’ question, Arnett, 56, replied: “I’m sorry. The question is, did I poo in front of Amy? And you’re saying that I don’t have manners? What are you talking about?”
He then refused to engage any further.
Lashing out at his co-host, he added: “It’s not a good question. I refuse to answer it. I refuse to answer that. It’s none of your f***ing business.”
Arnett and Poehler were married from 2003 until 2016. The pair first crossed paths in New York’s comedy world in the 1990s, and their relationship ended after years of what both have described as a painful split. Despite the divorce, they have continued to speak positively about one another and have long said co-parenting their sons has remained a priority.
Poehler has previously spoken about that period of her life in her 2014 memoir, explaining why she prefers not to discuss the breakup in depth.
“I don’t want to talk about my divorce because it is too sad and too personal,” she wrote, adding that she also doesn’t like ‘people knowing sh**’.
She also emphasized the strong co-parenting relationship they maintained after separating.
The actress wrote that she was proud of how she and Arnett were raising their children together and said she did not view a nearly 10-year marriage as a failure.
“That being said, getting a divorce really sucks,” she noted.
Since then, Poehler has focused on her own projects, including her hit podcast Good Hang with Amy Poehler, which has drawn its own attention as one of the comedy world’s newer must-listen shows.
Arnett, meanwhile, was most recently linked to supermodel Carolyn Murphy. The pair reportedly split in spring 2026 after a relationship that began in late 2025, following Arnett’s earlier breakup with model and entrepreneur Alessandra Brawn, with whom he shares a son, Alexander “Denny” Denison Arnett.