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First, I’m going to start with my absolute favorite, which is this 2017 interview of director David Lynch talking about his Woody Woodpecker figurines. The story goes that in 1981, Lynch saw five Woody Woodpecker toys hanging up at a gas station and “rescued” them. “I screech on the brakes, I do a U-turn, go back, and I buy them and I save their lives,” he recounted. “I named them Chucko, Buster, Pete, Bob, and Dan, and they were my boys and they were in my office. They were my dear friends for a while, but certain traits started coming out and they became not so nice.” The interviewer noted that Lynch then looked “straight ahead” and said “with a grim finality,” “They are not in my life anymore.” To which I say…WTF???
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Not bizarre enough for you? Let’s talk about Robert Pattinson’s GQ profile, where he talks about his business idea for “pasta which you can hold in your hand,” which he’s named Piccolini Cuscino. He decides to try to make it for the interviewer because “maybe if I say it in GQ, maybe, like, a partner will just come along.” He then shows the interviewer an old box of cornflakes, a giant novelty lighter, nine packs of presliced cheese, and sauce. He puts on latex gloves and bends tinfoil into a sort of sphere that he dumps sugar, crumbled-up cornflakes, sauce, and the presliced cheese into. He tries to cook pasta in the microwave, then takes it out and says, “No idea if it’s cooked or not,” but puts it in the foil anyways.
“I mean, there’s absolutely no chance this is gonna work. Absolutely none,” he tells the interviewer, then tops his creation with half a bun, which he burns a “PC” into with the novelty lighter, accidentally burning his hand in the process. He then wraps it up with more foil, squeezes it a few times, and decides to put it in what looks to be a microwave, but he claims is an oven, for 10 minutes. According to the interviewer, while in the oven/microwave, “a lightning bolt erupts” and “Pattinson ducks like someone outside has opened fire,” then crouches and giggles “as the oven throws off stray flickers of light and sound.” The oven/microwave goes dark and he stares at it, saying, “Yeah, I think I have to leave that alone. But that is a Piccolini Cuscino.”
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Ezra Miller has become embroiled in controversy over the last few years, but before all that news broke, a GQ interviewer took a trip to their farm in Vermont for what turned out to be an extremely odd interview. In the interview, Miller is preparing to help one of their goats give birth, then says their band is working on a metal song about it. They then sing/yell for the interviewer, “GOAT BIRTH, GOAT BIRTH, IT IS COMING, IT IS COMING! GOAT BIRTH, GOAT BIRTH, YOU CANNOT RUN, YOU CANNOT HIDE, IT’S GOAT BIRTH, GOAT BIRTH, NO ESCAPING, NO ESCAPING, GOAT BIRTH!”…while fist-pumping.
Miller also tells the story of a book report they did in first grade. They chose the Stephen King novel Cujo and then did a special project on it: “I bought a big stuffed-animal dog, and I covered it in blood. I made a tape recording, and I hooked up the play button of the tape recorder to the dog’s paw… The idea was that you’d push the paw and you’d hear, out of the voice of this bloody stuffed dog, my dramatic reading of Cujo.” Afterward, “the teacher very politely said, ‘Ezra, we’re going to put this in the closet until the end of the day, and then you’re going to have to take it home.” Miller also says they can “sense” when cellphones are around. And at one point, Miller tells a fan, “I am Ezra. But you can call me Lil Baby, or Sweet Bitch.”
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Johnny Depp’s Rolling Stone profile is truly one of the wildest profiles I’ve ever read. In it, Depp says (apparently credibly) that his old roommate was a bank robber, that he once gave his whole house scabies, that he thinks there should be a Titanic remake shot entirely in a bathtub, and that planes should have sprayed LSD over Iraq to capture Osama bin Laden. “You get a bunch of fucking planes, big fucking planes that spray shit, and you drop LSD 25. You saturate the fucking place. Every single thing will walk out of their cave smiling, happy,” he told the interviewer.
At one point, he breaks out a guitar and plays “Wonderwall.” The interviewer also has to shimmy over the fence to get out of his property because Depp can’t figure out how to open the gate. But the bulk of the interview is about Depp’s financial troubles, noting his extravagant spending, like $30,000 a month on wine and the time he spent $3 million shooting Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes into the air using a cannon. Though Depp claims, “It was not $3 million to shoot Hunter into the fucking sky” — it was actually $5 million — and “It’s insulting to say that I spent $30,000 on wine, because it was far more.”
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After the whole “replacing Terrence Howard in Iron Man 2” controversy, Howard took up an interesting hobby: trying to prove that 1×1=2 instead of 1. According to the interviewer, “He began writing down his logic, in a language of his own devising that he calls Terryology. He wrote forward and backward, with both his right and left hands, sometimes using symbols he made up that look foreign, if not alien, to keep his ideas secret until they could be patented.” He and his then-wife, Miranda Pak, began buying scissors, wire, magnets, and sheets of plastic, then spending up to 17 hours a day cutting out and joining the plastic in ways that were meant to prove his various mathematical theories.
The interviewers note that the room they’re in is completely filled with complex building block–like plastic shapes that are tied together or magnetically stuck together — which Howard apparently loves as much as his own child. Howard tells the interviewer, “This is the last century that our children will ever have been taught that one times one is one. They won’t have to grow up in ignorance. Twenty years from now, they’ll know that one times one equals two. We’re about to show a new truth. The true universal math. And the proof is in these pieces. I have created the pieces that make up the motion of the universe. […] They tell the truth from within.”
Howard’s relationship with Pak is also bizarre in the interview. Pak is in his house during it, and the two seem to be together, but the interviewer later discovers that they’ve filed for divorce and haven’t lived together in a while. When Howard leaves the room, Pak talks about him, saying that he doesn’t help out around the house and she “probably leave[s] him 30 times a month.” She also says they don’t have a normal life and have rarely gone to restaurants together. “We’ve never been to the supermarket together. We’ve never been to the movies. I’ve never gotten a gift from him. […] And then every minute that he has free, it’s to do this,” she says, referring to the plastic objects. “I help him, cutting, drawing and putting things together. I’ve developed a slight form of agoraphobia lately. I never go out. I have no friends here. I feel like Rapunzel, you know, stuck in a penthouse with my baby.”
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I’m honestly jealous of the interviewer for this Chris Evans GQ profile that was done before Captain America came out, in which he flirts heavily with the writer and basically brings her into his inner circle for a few days. She even stays at his house after getting drunk, plays a “jump over the pool table” game, and escapes through a window to try to get home.
Chris’s quotes aren’t all that bizarre, though he does say that “the times in [his] life when [he’s] been happiest are the times when [he’s] seen, like, a sunset” or a waterfall, and seems to have a strong affinity for high fives and making “jerk-off gestures when he was sick of hearing himself talk.”
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Another fun long-form GQ profile where the interviewer basically just gets drunk and has a wild time with a celebrity (excuse me, where can I sign up for that job?) is this one with Channing Tatum, where he takes the journalist “camping.” One revelation from the interview is that Tatum likes to do what he calls “spontaneous home invasion” on his friends, like Marlon Wayans, whom he surprised by showing up at his pool naked.
Some other highlights: They meet a number of strange characters, including a man at the bar named “Ordinary Tom,” who says he’s called that because “the town already had a Psycho Tom and a Vietnam Tom.” Ordinary Tom also shows them his wife, of whom he says, “She had cancer. She’s in remission now, but she lost her teeth and her tit. She used to be built like a brick shithouse.” They get brought to a random man’s house to stay (the friend of two guys they meet at a bar) but decide to sleep in the town’s abandoned jail instead, though they end up sleeping in Snuggies in some bushes outside after Tatum decides that a creepy mannequin inside the jail cell is too scary to sleep next to.
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I’m also obsessed with this interview with Miles Teller where he makes the interviewer cut pork into tiny pieces for him, saying, “I don’t have back teeth. I literally have four teeth.” The interviewer also blasts his appearance a bit, noting that he says, “I was thinking about that today, how I probably think I’m better-looking than the public thinks I am” with a laugh, “like it’s funny that he’s willed himself into a higher tier of male beauty through limitless confidence.”
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Back in 2022, Donald Glover literally interviewed himself for a magazine profile. His answers aren’t *that* weird, but there are still a few gems inside, like when he asks himself whom he models his career after, and he replies “Willy Wonka.” But the strangeness of the interview mostly comes from disagreeing with himself and asking himself questions that he then seems to get upset were asked, like when he asks himself, “Are you afraid of Black women?” and Glover replies with, “Why are you asking me that?” and “I feel like you’re using Black women to question my Blackness.”
10.
You gotta love this infamous Vulture interview with Quincy Jones, who did NOT hold back when it came to talking about his fellow musicians and the music industry in general. First, he claimed that Michael Jackson “stole a lot of songs” and was “greedy.” He also said, “Rock ain’t nothing but a white version of rhythm and blues,” and the Beatles were “the worst musicians in the world. They were no-playing motherfuckers. Paul was the worst bass player I ever heard. And Ringo? Don’t even talk about it.” He also said he used to hang out with Donald Trump and called him “a crazy motherfucker. Limited mentally — a megalomaniac, narcissistic. I can’t stand him.” Jones was friends with Marlon Brando, as well, and claimed that Brando would “fuck anything. Anything! He’d fuck a mailbox. James Baldwin. Richard Pryor. Marvin Gaye.”
He also spoke negatively about T-Pain and Bono’s music (though he called Bono “my brother”). But the most bizarre part? Jones said he knew “too much,” including who killed JFK, also alluding to knowing Hillary Clinton’s secrets and the Bill Cosby allegations before they were made, saying, “We can’t talk about this in public, man.” In fact, he makes that claim a few times, which makes me wonder…what does Jones know???
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RuPaul once told a story about watching a man drown — to us at BuzzFeed, no less. “I remember once I had this place that overlooked the Hudson River, and I saw this guy on a sailboat and it had capsized, and I went to the phone thinking, I’ve got to call someone. But then I thought, What’s the best thing I can do? You know what? I’m gonna pray for this person. I’m gonna send them loving energy.” As the BuzzFeed piece points out, RuPaul does not say whether the man survived.
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In an interview with Men’s Journal, Mark Wahlberg — who was supposed to be on one of the planes that crashed on 9/11 — said, “If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.'”
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Sean Penn also got pretty worked up about 9/11 in an interview with Variety, saying that if he were president at the time, “I’d have let White House counsel know that they are on vacation. I’m not consulting with them. If I have to go to prison, I’ll go, but I’m going to kill them. I’m killing everyone that did this,” he said. Because apparently Penn is some sort of Liam Neeson–in–Taken–style vigilante.
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This one’s small, but it always makes me crack up. In 2016, Kid Cudi said of his music career so far: “People think that I’ve peaked. I haven’t even gotten a f—ing nut off yet,” he said. “I’ve been pre-cumming for the last eight years. I haven’t even ejaculated a full spew yet. So motherf—rs better get prepared.”
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And finally, this one might not be quite as bizarre as the rest, but it’s still one of my favorite interview quotes of all time because it’s just so funny and random. In a 2009 interview with Jesse Eisenberg, he says, “People on the street sometimes will say mean things to me,” and the interviewer asks for an example. Eisenberg says, “I get called Napoleon Dynamite because I have curly hair. I live in New York City and I ride a bicycle. I always bike down Ninth Avenue, and there’s this kid who goes to school there named Abraham. Every time I pass him, he calls me Napoleon Dynamite. He screams it out and his friends laugh. That was a fine movie, but I wasn’t in it.”
The interviewer then asks how Eisenberg responds to the boy. Eisenberg replies, “I say, ‘Please, Abraham, I’m not that man.” I just can’t get past the image of movie star Jesse Eisenberg being bullied by a child named Abraham and still being painstakingly polite to him.
What’s the strangest celeb interview or interview quote you’ve ever seen? Let us know in the comments!
