6 Celebrities Who Are Fanboys Of The Last Thing You Expect
People go through great lengths to hide their guilty pleasures. We'll listen to that cheesy '80s song with headphones only, or hide those pony cartoon DVDs inside The Wire box sets, or browse that dick joke website in private mode. While there's a shocking lack of hard research in this area, every single person on the planet probably has something like that ... except, of course, for celebrities.
No, it's not that celebrities don't like stupid things; it's that their stratospheric egos have rendered them incapable of feeling any shame. That's why so many famous people will readily admit to having image-shattering "guilty" pleasures. For instance ...
Anthony Hopkins Fucking Loves American Idol
Anthony Hopkins is arguably one of the greatest actors of his generation, and we can generally trust him to have quality taste in film and television. For example, he once wrote a letter to Bryan Cranston about how much he loved Breaking Bad. Hopkins marathoned the show, and wanted to let Cranston know how great he was because, we quote, "there is so much smoke blowing and sickening bullshit in this business, and I've sort of lost belief in anything really."
Sickening bullshit ... like Mob Wives, maybe? Mob Wives is more or less The Sopranos for the reality TV crowd on a good day, and a confusing mess to the Real Housewives crowd on any other day. Yet Hopkins claims to love this too. We're reasonably certain that's grounds for having his "Sir" title revoked.
It does have one thing in common with Breaking Bad: They're both about people losing their hair.
Mob Wives is Hopkins' idea of a perfect night in, but it's not quite enough to really get him going. That spot in his heart belongs to an even more brutal show: American Idol. In particular, he's a big fan of both Simon Cowell and Randy Jackson, but for different reasons. He likes how Randy is fair but upbeat with every contestant, and even imitated his "Hey, dawg!" (please imagine that, because we can't). On the other side of that coin, he thinks it's great that Cowell is "so brutally honest. There's no political correctness with him. He says it as it is." Spoken like Hannibal Lecter at a Trump rally.
"Holy shit, Seacrest is looking this way! Keep it together, Anthony."
The biggest mark of his dedication to Idol is that he once said he wanted to make an American Idol feature film, somehow. We hate to break it to you, Anthony, but they already did that, and it killed any potential future career moves for Justin Guarini.
Michael Bay Is Obsessed With West Side Story
Back around 2003, New York Times writer Rick Lyman wrote a book about movies by sitting down with a bunch of directors and letting them pick a film to watch with him. When he got to Michael Bay, he was probably expecting an internet video of teenagers detonating homemade bombs hastily constructed out of a jar of olives and a bottle of mouthwash. Much to Lyman's surprise, Bay picked and proceeded to geek the hell out over this movie:
According to Bay himself, the 1961 film version of West Side Story is what got him into filmmaking in the first place. He begrudgingly took a class on musical theater at Wesleyan, only to find that he fucking loves musicals. He'd been teetering back and forth over whether he was better suited to photography or filmmaking, and a weakly-spray-tanned Natalie Wood pushed him toward one day making talking trucks punch each other for two and a half hours.
Bay learned from every aspect of West Side Story. We'll let him explain this in his own words:
He's been trying to recreate the feeling that a movie has gone on for too long since then.
You're reading that correctly. Michael Bay thought that Robert Wise's visualization of New York City was a creation on par with the construction of Dagobah. If we keep reading, it makes sense how he could somehow put Transformers together from the shreds of "When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way."
Michael Bay is all about putting the camera where it logically cannot be (in front of Shia Labeouf).
You see? The Autobots and Decepticons aren't dumb and loud! They're just part of a world within a world! Of course, this probably means that if Bay had seen Star Wars or something in college, The Rock would be a musical.
A Bunch Of Other Directors Also Have Hilarious Taste In Film
Everybody's got one or two stinkers in their movie library (you really didn't need that "special edition" of Bedazzled, dude), but you'd kind of expect some of the greatest directors of our time to have a little bit more refined preferences. You would be wrong.
We'll kick things off with Roman Polanski, whose critically-acclaimed body of work includes Chinatown and The Pianist ... and who is an improbably huge fan of Rush Hour. The director of the grittiest detective film of the '70s loves a movie franchise about Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan kicking criminals of various accents in the nuts. Polanski loved these films so much, in fact, that he talked his way into not merely a cameo appearance in Rush Hour 3, but a role in several scenes, with lines.
He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars, but he just said, "Nice try, LAPD."
On a similar note, Alfred Hitchcock loved him some Smokey And The Bandit, which was a buddy action comedy about Burt Reynolds and his mustache smuggling Coors into Georgia. He loved it so much that he made sure it was the last film he watched before he died. On an even more similar note, it seems Quentin Tarantino really hates Hitchcock, because he's made it a point to state that he enjoys every Psycho sequel so much more than the original. He even prefers the shot-for-shot '90s remake, the deranged bastard.
Removing that number from the door really made all the difference.
Meanwhile, according to The Dark Knight Rises star Anne Hathaway, if you catch Christopher Nolan on a good day, he'll start quoting MacGruber to the cast (on a bad one, he'll presumably go with It's Pat). But that's not even the best part. Nolan is, according to his old pal and regular director of photography Wally Pfister, a huge goddamned Michael Bay fan. Yes, even the Transformers movies -- which means, by the transitive property, that he's a West Side Story fan.
Shaq Forced His Way Onto An Episode Of Southland
If you're not one of the five people who watched it, Southland was a TNT drama about the lives of a bunch of cops in Los Angeles ... except for the brief, magical moment when it was about Shaquille O'Neal talking about boobs.
It turns out Shaq was a big fan of the show and wished he could be in it. That's when he presumably said to himself, "Wait a minute, I'm Shaq! I can do anything!" So he called the producers and introduced himself as a police officer (which Shaq actually is), then sent them pics of himself dressed in his uniform and telling them he wanted to shoot next week. They obeyed, of course.
If you get this photo and a single order in your email, you do it, whatever it is.
They didn't even bother making the scene look like it wasn't shoehorned in. We'll just go ahead and walk you through the scene that was created especially for Dr. Shaquille O'Neal, Ed.D. A fancy-pants funeral is beginning, and the hearse is a horse-drawn carriage. A couple of Southland mainstays, Officers Crenshaw and Lucero, are commenting on how the "mourners" are probably only there to get something out of the dead guy when fucking Shaq pulls up.
Shaq's character, Earl Dayton, is a cop who went to the academy with Crenshaw, and by happy coincidence, everybody has arrest warrants for someone at this freaking funeral. Earl's wife's boss apparently just got quite the enormous boob job, which everyone shrugs off as normal. After the pleasantries are over, Earl and Crenshaw show each other their respective arrest warrants, promise to keep an eye out for the others' guy, and that should be it. Shaq has to get the last word in, though, and tells Lucero to stop using so much hair gel as he drives away singing "La Bamba" to nobody in particular.
Wait, is he arresting himself? Since he's Shaq, we're pretty sure he can do that too.
It should be noted that Shaq loves this show for how realistic its portrayal of police work is, so maybe keep an eye out at the next funeral you're attending.
A Whole Bunch Of Big-Name Celebrities Are Really, Really Into Metal Music
You'd think that as stressful as A-list actors claim their multi-million-dollar lives are, their music choices would be "A River Flows In You" on repeat until the end of time. Instead, a whole bunch of them are into metal, a genre once dominated by large guys wearing filthy T-shirts and even filthier beards.
Jim Carrey, for example, is a huge fan of trash metal -- in particular, Napalm Death:
A death metal band called Cannibal Corpse (exactly as hardcore as it sounds) had a cameo in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and of course that was completely Carrey's idea. He even changed the film's production schedule to accommodate the band, then quoted their newest songs to them when they met. The most impressive part is that this was before Bob Dole made them more famous by condemning them. Finally, Carrey's daughter married (and later divorced) the lead singer of Blood Money, which we'd think would make Carrey frown a little bit at metal singers, but nope.
On the lighter side of metal, Benicio del Toro is such a big Iron Maiden nerd that when he found out a production assistant on Guardians Of The Galaxy was the daughter of Iron Maiden guitarist Adrian Smith, he freaked out and asked to take pictures with her. We wouldn't be surprised if he reverted to his Usual Suspects gibberish speak from the excitement.
He reportedly sent the photos to a friend, who probably wondered "Why does Gary Glitter have my number?"
Then we've got Jada Pinkett Smith. She formed her own nu metal band, Wicked Wisdom, which has played at Ozzfest, jammed with hardcore punk band Bury Your Dead, and opened for ... uh, Britney Spears. But still. Smith is also a huge fan of Mastodon, Crowbar, and Skindred, which honestly sound more like names her son would give his cats than they do metal bands.
As a parting treat to you, here's Smith and Wicked Wisdom's most recent single:
The comparisons to "Getting' Jiggy Wit It" must get tiresome.
Deep inside us all behind our political leanings, our moral codes and our private biases, there is a cause so colossally stupid, we surprise ourselves with how much we care. Whether it's toilet paper position, fedoras on men or Oxford commas, we each harbor a preference so powerful we can't help but proselytize to the world. In this episode of the Cracked podcast, guest host Soren Bowie is joined by Cody Johnston, Michael Swaim and comedian Annie Lederman to discuss the most trivial things we will argue about until the day we die. Get your tickets here!
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