5 Bizarre Celebrity Trends You've Probably Not Noticed
It's been said before that celebrities are just like us, and I believe that. If you put me and the Rock side by side, why, you'd have no idea who was who. Incidentally, if anyone wants to make a sequel to Rampage, I will star in it for 50 percent less than what the Rock gets paid, and I am willing to kiss that monkey. Anyway, the point is that celebrities, like the rest of us, tend to follow predictable trends.
Then again, just because they're predictable doesn't mean they're not super weird ...
Game Show Hosts Keep Turning Into Hardcore Conservatives
"Extremely Republican game show host" is such a common phenomenon that other publications have asked experts to look into what's causing it. The answers all seem iffy -- something about how hosting a contest makes you believe in merit-based individualism?
Let's start with Chuck Woolery. If you're under the age of dead, you may not know who he is, but he used to host a show called The Love Connection, which was like Tinder, but with a glib man judging you in front of a studio audience. Losers were sacrificed to a volcano! That's how long ago this was! These days, thanks to Twitter, we also know that Woolery is a staunch conservative and Trump supporter.
His feed continually spawns headlines like "Game Show Host Chuck Woolery Accused of Anti-Semitism After Karl Marx Vladimir Lenin Comments on Twitter." He uses his platform to decry the evils of Obama, vaunt the genius of Donald Trump, and talk about how Islam is "gonna get us all killed." If you're wondering what an elderly man who made millions doing what seems like a fairly easy job has to be angry about, good question! If you figure that out, you'll figure out America.
Then there's Pat Sajak, the Wheel Of Fortune host (fun fact: he actually replaced Chuck Woolerly in 1981), who for decades seemed like network TV's version of a golem fashioned from clay to be inoffensive and boring in every way. Then he too found Twitter, and his feed is a train wreck of conservative posturing and blind frothing rage. One of Sajak's biggest bugaboos is climate change, a subject he returns to again and again with statements like "I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends." Alrighty!
Wink Martindale, who has an astonishing six decades in radio and television, came out as a Trump supporter, and he uses Twitter to mock athletes who take a knee during the national anthem. Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein's Money said back in 2016 that he's sure Donald Trump doesn't know a goddamn thing about the economy ... but that he'd still vote for him. He has since said that the people who heckled Mitch McConnell at a restaurant were like Nazis, and he called Obama the most racist president ever. Related note: Some presidents literally owned slaves.
Related: 16 Famous People Who Seemingly Turned Into Different Humans
Pro Wrestlers Keep Going Into Real Estate
What kind of a retirement can you carve out for yourself if your main skill is jumping off of turnbuckles to fake dropping an elbow on another human being? Well, once the life of a wrestler hits that crossroads where they need to find a new career, a lot of them seem to turn to real estate.
One of the most famous real estate wrestlers in the game is Rick Steiner. One half of the wrestler duo the Steiner Brothers, his most famous persona saw him nicknamed "The Dog-Faced Gremlin." He would act like a bit of a beastly fellow and beat the snot out of his opponents. And now he owns a business selling homes alongside his wife. This, apparently, is now the natural life cycle of a professional wrestler.
Scotty 2 Hotty, which I think is his birth name, won multiple belts in the WWE and, most famously, was the guy who did the Worm in the ring, easily the most preposterous move in all of professional wrestling.
When the Worm stopped killing it, Scotty got his real estate license. Because fame is fleeting, but people are always going to need a place to live. Likewise, WWE superstar Kane went on to bigger and better things after spending several years pretending to be the horribly burned psychotic brother of the Undertaker. He now runs a real estate agency with his wife -- and oh, by the way, he's also the mayor of Knox County, Tennessee.
The list goes on and on. Wrestlers you could conceivably have purchased a home from include Diva Nikki Bella, Mike Awesome, Sarah Rotunda, and Back Jack Mulligan. (Who wasn't just a real estate agent, but also a little crooked and went to prison for shady investments. Nice.)
Related: WTF Secret Lives Your Favorite Celebs Keep Under The Radar
Comedians Love To Play Psychopaths
It's perfectly normal for comedians to hit middle age and decide they want dramatic roles. You're not gonna win awards for playing Adam Sandler's fat friend in Fart Vacation 3. But there's another pervasive trend of comedians deciding that the best way to break out of typecasting is to play psychopaths. Maybe they're taking the Jim Carrey Cable Guy strategy as a template?
Take Dane Cook, who played an aspiring serial killer in the movie Mr. Brooks. Now, no one really liked Mr. Brooks, and if Stereogum is to be believed, it's one of the worst movies ever, in large part because of Dane Cook. Still, this was a guy famous for his college-targeted stand-up at the height of his career. In 2006, Cook hosted the Teen Choice Awards, and in 2007 he became only the second comedian in history to sell out Madison Square Garden. That was the year this movie came out. It was a bold career choice, is what I'm saying.
Even more unsettling was Mo'Nique's turn as the mother in Precious. After making a name for herself in stand-up and starring in some sitcoms, she got the role of Mary Lee Johnston and basically transformed from one of the queens of comedy into a terrifying abusive monster.
That's also the turn Rodney Dangerfield took with his role in Natural Born Killers, starring in a deeply upsetting sequence that starts like a sitcom parody and quickly degrades into a gross, molesty nightmare:
More recently, we have Bill Hader, who became famous on SNL for portraying characters like Stefon (a bit I loved because writer John Mulaney would constantly throw new jokes into Hader's teleprompter to make him crack up on camera). Hader has gone on to have his own show on HBO, Barry, in which he plays a remorseless assassin. If you've only seen ads for the show, it'd be easy to assume it's a "hitman with a heart of gold" action-comedy, full of quips and targets who deserve their fates. I don't want to spoil anything, but if you watch the first season with that in mind, you'll end your watch feeling like you've been kicked in the gut by a horse.
So what happens to the people who start their careers by murdering hundreds of extras?
Related: 22 People Who Admitted They Were Terrible, And Changed
Action Stars Become Born-Again Christians
Far be it from me to criticize anyone who found Jesus. Or Buddha, Muhammad, or the space monster Scientologists worship. If you're being fulfilled and making life better, then good for you. But I still think it's a weird trend that stars who get famous for destroying other people on film often decide that in their personal lives, they're all about dat redemption.
Like Chuck Norris, who admits that he strayed from his faith for some years before discovering an affair had led to a daughter he never knew existed. Norris is very much about giving God all the credit for the good in his life, and even writes books on the subject.
'90s TV hero Kevin Sorbo takes it further. He spent years playing Hercules on a show produced by Sam Raimi, the guy who gave us The Evil Dead. Then Sorbo nearly died from an aneurysm, which set him on his current pious path in life. That's why he gave up being an action star to focus on movies like Let There Be Light, in which he got to pretend to be an atheist and use his own script to dunk on himself.
Then there's Chris Tucker, who at one point was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood thanks to the three Rush Hour movies and almost nothing else. Word has it that it was sometime in the late '90s that Tucker found God and cleaned up his act -- and I mean that literally, in that he actually took the cursing out of his stand-up routine.
Naturally, there's no point in discussing action stars if you're not going to discuss Mr. T, so you should know Mr. T is also a born-again Christian and that The A-Team is still the greatest show in TV history.
Related: The 7 Most Terrifying Celebrity Transformations
Porn Stars Frequently Turn Political
In a galaxy brain kind of way, this one almost makes too much sense. If you keep up with current events, you already know about Stormy Daniels taking on Donald Trump, but her first foray into politics had nothing to do with him. In 2009, she was a Senate contender in Louisiana.
Mimi Miyagi and Mary Carey both tried for governor in their respective states of Nevada and California. Part of Carey's platform included the "Porn for Pistols" initiative, which would have swapped guns for porn in an effort to clean up the streets. She also wanted to have webcams running in the governor's mansion so you could see politics at work. I say add a scrolling chat window too so that citizens could curse at them in real time.
Across the pond, Italian adult film actresses have more political success. Milly D'Abbraccio, Moana Pozzi, and Ilona Staller all made their mark in Italian politics. Staller was elected to Parliament in 1987 after a fairly robust porn career, proving Italians are deadass chill people. Pozzi and D'Abbraccio both ran as members of the Love Party but didn't succeed in their bids. But hey, they tried! D'Abbraccio used pics of her butt in political ads, and ran on a platform trying to get a red light district built a few blocks away from the Vatican.
I realize some of those people were just running for the publicity, but what difference does that make? Trump was probably just trying to pump up his book sales, and the next thing you know, he's the most powerful person on Earth.
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