The New York Times Wants Keegan Michael-Key to Invade Your Wordle Group Chats

Keegan Michael-Key wants to crush your Wordle dreams.

The actor, writer and comedian is working with The New York Times on a fresh marketing push for its New York Times Games division, including Wordle, the wordplay game the Times acquired last year.

The push includes a contest in which users share their scores from Wordle, Spelling Bee and the crossword puzzle on social media, tagging their friends and the hashtag #NYTGamesChallenge. Winners will get swag or other prizes. But the grand prize? Michael-Key in their group chat with friends and family.

“I am going to play to win,” Michael-Key tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “I’m going to have to be as competitive as possible. I’m a competitive guy. So I want to say that it’s not any big deal, but I’m going to try to draw blood.”

Games have become a critical focus for the Times, which has leveraged its leadership in crossword puzzles to develop an entire suite of offerings, many of them built on wordplay (in addition to Wordle, Spelling Bee has become a popular daily challenge).

Now, it wants to bolster engagement with its offerings, and the social media marketing push is just the latest effort in that space. Earlier this week the Times announced Wordle Golf, a competitive expansion of the game meant to encourage users to play Wordle in competition with their family and friends.

And now Michael-Key, an avowed New York Times Games fan, is getting involved.

“It’s the legacy of something as August as the New York Times, that I was honored to be asked to be a part of this campaign and a part of this program,” Michael-Key says. “Remember they’ve been they’ve been doing this with regard to games since the ’40s, and it’s been it’s been such an integral part of The New York Times. It’s all the news that’s fit to print, but it’s also all the games that are fit to print.”

And, yes, Michael-Key has a Wordle group chat of his own, joined by his brother-in-law, sisters-in-law, an old childhood friend, and her husband.

“Much to my chagrin, her husband is the one who’s killing it,” he says. “It’s like this guy like, can you just go a day without getting in three, please? He’s amazing.”

Now he says he’s excited to enter a new group chat, with strangers, and figure out “what are their dynamics, and how do they play the game, and how competitive are they?”

“Are they going to take it easy on me? Or are they going to go after me like a pack of wolves?” he adds. “Who knows, because the dynamic is so different between each and every group of people playing these games, so it’ll be fun to kind of slide into somebody’s Wordle group chat and see what their dynamic is.”