Through our work here at BuzzFeed, we’ve learned a TON of startling things about celebs — from hidden bad behavior and awful allegations to bonkers facts and wild quotes. Below are some of the most shocking posts that genuinely might change your perception of these famous people.
1.
In early 2021, Gina Carano posted a photo to social media comparing being a Republican to being Jewish during the Holocaust, which caused fans to dig up some other past problematic social media posts, in which she denounced wearing face masks and claimed voter fraud in 2020. She was quickly asked not to return to The Mandalorian and plans were scrapped for her character to have her own show. She was dropped by her agency, quit the union, and moved towards conservative media projects like My Son Hunter.
As for musicians who ruined their careers overnight, we’ve got plenty.
2.
I wouldn’t say Sia’s career is over, but she certainly isn’t as big as she was in the 2010s, and there’s one thing that takes a lot of the blame: her film Music and her response to its controversy. Music starred longtime collaborator Maddie Ziegler as a nonverbal autistic character. Backlash was strong even before it came out, especially regarding Sia’s choice to cast a neurotypical actor. Still, Sia only made things worse during the film’s promotion, most notably when an actor with autism called her out for not casting someone like her, and Sia replied, “Maybe you’re just a bad actor.” Sia also stated she “actually tried working with a beautiful young girl, nonverbal on the spectrum, and she found it unpleasant and stressful.”
3.
Another celeb whose career was canceled, but in a different industry? Colleen Ballinger, aka YouTube star Miranda Sings, who, in the 2000s, gained fame confidently and badly singing popular songs with lipstick smeared above her top lip. She was able to foray this into a Netflix special and show, and she was successful for over a decade — until allegations came out that she’d put underage fans in exploitative positions and engaged with them in inappropriate ways. Brands began to pull ads from Ballinger’s projects as public backlash increased, but the nail in the coffin for Ballinger was her ukulele “apology” video, where she literally sang about the allegations.
4.
Jerry Seinfeld was in his late thirties and at the height of his fame when he “dated” a literal high schooler (Shoshanna Lonstein), though he claims she was 18 when they began the romantic aspect of their relationship. After she turned 18, he told Howard Stern, “I didn’t realize she was so young. This is the only girl I ever went out with who was that young. I wasn’t dating her. We just went to a restaurant, and that was it.” He confirmed their relationship a few years later.
5.
And then there’s Steven Tyler, who admitted in his memoir that he’d slept with a minor, writing, “She was 16, she knew how to nasty, and there wasn’t a hair on it.” It’s likely Tyler is referring to Julia Misely (formerly Holcomb), who sued him in 2022 for sexual assault, sexual battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress back in the ’70s. Like Tyler stated in his memoir, she claims Tyler persuaded her mother to sign over guardianship to him, which is corroborated in Tyler’s own memoir — he writes “her parents fell in love with me, signed a paper over for me to have custody, so I wouldn’t get arrested if I took her out of state. I took her on tour with me.” Tyler was 26.
6.
Liam Neeson once recounted looking for revenge after discovering a friend had been raped…by a Black man. “I went up and down areas with a cosh [editor’s note: a cosh is a blunt weapon like a club], hoping I’d be approached by somebody — I’m ashamed to say that — and I did it for maybe a week, hoping some [Neeson used air quotes] ‘Black bastard’ would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could kill him.” He also told Good Morning America, “There were some nights I went out deliberately into Black areas in the city looking to be set upon so that I could unleash physical violence.”
7.
John Stamos once told a super creepy story about getting his friend laid by tricking a woman into thinking she was having sex with him in the mid-’80s. “I was in a band. I was playing somewhere in Finland, and there was a girl hanging around who was really drunk and interested in me. I wasn’t into her, but my friend was. So the girl came back to my hotel, and I turned the lights down, and we started making out. I said, ‘Hold on a second, I’ve gotta go brush my teeth.’ It was dark, I left the room, and I sent in my friend who looked like me. And she thought she was having sex with me, but she was really having sex with my friend.”
8.
Moving towards other messed-up things celebs said, Howard Stern is known for his envelope-pushing, but he took things too far when he spoke about Columbine only one day after the shooting. He joked, “There were some really good-looking girls running with their hands over their heads. Did those kids try to have sex with any of those good-looking girls? They didn’t even do that?” Stern asked. “At least if you’re going to kill yourself and kill the kids, why wouldn’t you have some sex? If I was going to kill some people, I’d take them out with sex.” He also played gunshots over Selena’s music after her death and said, “This music does absolutely nothing for me. … Spanish people have the worst taste in music. They have no depth.”
9.
Oh, and then there’s all of his horrific comments about the Olsen twins before they were 18, including, “Now, normally I don’t look at a 13-year-old and sexualize them, I don’t, but these two are pieces of ass. They’ve grown up so perfect.” Stern later said he didn’t actually want to have sex with them anymore because “Something went wrong. They stopped growing, or something.” Agreeing that they didn’t turn out “as hot” as he thought they’d be, he said, “It really looked for a while like when they were 13 or 14 that they were gonna be supermodels…I was counting down to their 18th birthday so we could have sex with them.”
10.
Steve Rannazzisi used to claim that he’d been working at Merrill Lynch in the Twin Towers during the 9/11 attacks. “I worked in the 54th floor of the second tower,” he recalled in 2009. “I was there. The first tower got hit, and we got jostled all over the place. Then the Port Authority came on the loudspeaker, ‘Explosion in Tower 1, things are being taken care of, everyone remain where you are, stay calm, we’re figuring things out.’ And I was like, ‘I’m going to check this thing out. I went downstairs, went outside, saw all the pandemonium, and then about five or six minutes later, ‘bang’ [the second tower was struck].” In 2022, he admitted his story was a lie.
11.
Kid Rock built an image around being a poor redneck who came “straight out the trailer” — when in reality, he was born to millionaire parents and lived on an estate in Michigan with a complete guest house, apple orchard, horse stables, and private tennis courts. His father reportedly had a second home in Jupiter Island, Florida.
12.
Jack Nicholson was raised by his grandmother, who he believed to be his mother — it turns out that the much older “sister” he’d had was his real mother. His mother was only 18 when she had him, as a result of a relationship with a married man. To avoid scandal, Nicholson’s grandmother claimed him as her own. He didn’t find out the truth until after his mother died, when Time magazine did a profile on him in 1974 (directly before the release of his film Chinatown) and discovered the truth in their research. The most eerie part? Nicholson’s character finds out the truth about another character — namely, that her “sister” is actually her daughter — in Chinatown.
13.
Keith Richards once told a story about snorting his dad’s ashes along with some cocaine. “The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father,” he revealed in an interview. “He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared, he didn’t give a shit. It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”
14.
Paul McCartney told GQ about him, John Lennon, and some friends all once masturbating together at Lennon’s house. “Instead of just getting roaring drunk and partying—I don’t even know if we were staying over or anything—we were all just in these chairs, and the lights were out, and somebody started masturbating, so we all did.” Meanwhile, they would call out names of female sex symbols. “We were just, ‘Brigitte Bardot!’ ‘Whoo!’ And then everyone would thrash a bit more,” McCartney remembered. But then…”I think it was John sort of said, ‘Winston Churchill!'” McCartney then demonstrated to the interviewer the horrified reaction to this suggestion.
15.
Robbie Williams revealed on the Graham Norton Show that he once got a hand job from a fan (who he thought was a part of the cleaning staff at the castle he was staying at).
16.
You don’t? Here’s an example: when Kevin Gates told the world about having sex with his cousin….unbeknownst to him, at least at first. After the two were already sleeping together, he introduced her to his grandma, who revealed, “Baby, that’s your cousin!” But, Gates continued, “I ain’t about to stop! The damage has been done. I didn’t know you my whole life. I just found this out. We’ve already been thuggin’. And we still good friends to this day.”
17.
Kourtney Kardashian Barker revealed on The Kardashians that she had sex with her husband, Travis Barker, while 3cm dilated just before giving birth to their son. After being sent home from the hospital because she wasn’t quite ready to give birth, Kardashian revealed, “We went home, ate at Crossroads, showered, slept in our bed, and then we have sex to get things going to see if that helps. That can help sometimes.”
18.
Never forget the time Madonna reportedly chastised a fan for sitting during the show, saying, “What are you doing sitting down over there?” Walking forward and apparently realizing the person was in a wheelchair, Madonna said, “Oh, okay. Politically incorrect. Sorry about that. I’m glad you’re here.”
19.
I still cringe thinking about the time David Guetta, who, while livestreaming a DJ set for COVID relief, said he’d “made a special record in honor of George Floyd,” adding, “shoutout to his family” before playing an EDM mashup of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
20.
For example, Orlando Bloom raised eyebrows when he spoke to the Sunday Times about his morning routine, which included reading a “bit of Buddhism,” Buddhist chanting, drinking a mix of “brain octane oil,” and hiking while listening to Nirvana. But the real kicker came when he said, “I spend a lot of my time dreaming about roles for myself and others — for minorities and women. I’m trying to be a voice for everybody.” It kind of felt like Bloom was trying a little too hard to sound inclusive without really doing anything to back it up. Oh, and he talked about appreciating the beauty of cows.
21.
This one from David Lynch lives in my head rent-free…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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