Christie Brinkley revealed to be 'Lemur' on 'The Masked Singer'

Bridgehampton supermodel Christie Brinkley, the surprise celebrity unveiled on Fox's "The Masked Singer" Wednesday night, says she had "jumped at the chance" to appear on the musical game show, in which a panel of four judges tries to guess who is singing from inside a fanciful full-body costume.

"I just thought, why not?" Brinkley told People magazine in an article posted Thursday. "It looks like so much fun," she said, adding that the producers "really make a big point about that. You're there to have a good time."

Brinkley performed Carole King's 1971 classic of everyday eroticism, "I Feel the Earth Move," while dressed in a leggy cartoon-lemur costume. "The show gave me two costumes to choose from," she said. "The other costume was so fiercely glamorous and it was very body-con," she said, referring to highly formfitting, "body-conscious" clothing. "I thought to myself, 'I'll be sucking in my stomach the whole time in that costume.' … So, I'm going to go with the fuzzy little lemur because it looks comfortable, it looks fun and friendly, and I've never worn a lemur outfit before, so let's go."

Judge Ken Jeong was able to correctly identify Lemur as Brinkley.

The supermodel added on Instagram Thursday that "little Lemur was up all night the night before the big show … I had food poisoning so I could hardly get my tail out of the forest! But you know what they say … the show must go on! I was cleared for COVID so threw on my sparkliest diamonds, grabbed my mic, and gave it my best shot … and I had a great time doing it! And I got a great work out too. that tail may have looked light as a feather, but it was heavy!"

Aside from the tail, which she described in her post as "the biggest in Masked Singer history," the trim 68-year-old contestant found that "navigating the staircase with my blinding big head took all my energy so it was really hard to get enough air" to sing. "But thank you Masked Singer for the opportunity …. I love you all, but now," she jokes, "I must leap off to catch my flight back to Madagascar," the sole place to which lemurs are native.

Commenting on an Instagram post Brinkley had put up about the show Wednesday night, her singer daughter Alexa Ray Joel wrote, "They said you were the 'cutest one they had on the show' … how true! And the sweetest, too."