Celebrity Friendships That Deserve Their Own Sitcoms
It’s not all that surprising that celebrities tend to be friends with each other, because who else are they gonna be friends with? Their favorite barista? Please be serious. Sometimes, however, those friendships get so wacky, or they cross so many dividing lines between different kinds of celebrities, that they’re more interesting than anything they’ve worked on.
Elton John and Eminem
Eminem first met Elton John when they performed together at the 2001 Grammys in an attempt to rehabilitate his homophobic image, but when he decided he needed help for his drug addiction, he called John, who had struggled with his own addiction issues. “Gay rock star and bigoted rapper support each other through sobriety” has “prestige comedy drama” written all over it. Eminem has since adopted an unprintable pet name for John (it rhymes with “runt”) and gifted him and his husband a pair of diamond cock rings as a wedding present. It writes itself.
Bette Midler and 50 Cent
In another “gay icon meets hardcore rapper” story, Bette Midler was determined to build a community garden in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens as part of her New York Restoration Project organization in 2007 when she found out 50 Cent was raised in the neighborhood. So began her campaign to convince him to get involved and come garden with little old ladies that would win every Emmy. Of course, he agreed, and they’ve since become such good friends that Midler has hinted at potential collaborations. “In da Cabaret”?
Jennifer Love Hewitt and Betty White
After meeting on the set of a Hallmark movie in 2011, Hewitt and White became May-December BFFs, sometimes staying in to play Scrabble (at which Betty “cheated horribly”) and eat gummy bears, sometimes partying hard with pizza, vodka and drunken wanderings. It’s the perfect fodder for the poignant story of a thirtysomething sex symbol starting to feel Hollywood’s ageism learning to let go from one who’s been all the way through it.
Billy Bob Thornton and Hank Azaria
It’s not surprising that Billy Bob Thornton and Hank Azaria are friends, but they’re very committed to method acting. In the mid ‘90s, while Thornton played an intellectually disabled murderer in Sling Blade and Azaria played a gay Guatemalan butler in The Birdcage, they used to drive around “pretending Agador and Karl Childers were in a buddy cop film together.” It was basically Tropic Thunder: The Series, complete with flagrant insensitivity.
Zac Efron and Charlie Day
Technically, Zac Efron and Charlie Day kind of do already have their own sitcom. For once, Day is not the wild card in the dynamic, putting up with Efron’s DJ shenanigans (“Speakers face his house, so, even on their lowest setting, my phone would start ringing and he was like, ‘I have a baby, dude’”) and fielding misdirected letters from Efron’s horniest fans. Eventually, they started making videos together, including one in which Day tries to convince Efron to “go throw eggs at Brad and Angie’s house.”
Phew. That’s the Charlie we know.