1.
According to Michael Jackson’s brother, Randy Jackson, Tina Turner once shot him. Back in 2011, Jackson tweeted about the incident, writing that he had “the scar to prove it” and that he was at Tina’s to visit his girlfriend, Tina’s assistant Bernadette. “I guess I caught them off guard,” he wrote. Tina reportedly fired two shots, one in the ceiling and one through the doorway, and Randy jumped out through a window to escape.
2.
Mike Tyson claims he found his first wife, Robin Givens, in bed with Brad Pitt while they were still technically married but separated — though apparently still having sex. “This particular day, someone beat me to the punch. I guess Brad Pitt got there earlier than I did,” he said. “You had to see the look on his face. He looked like he was ready to receive his last rites,” Tyson later described Pitt, saying he looked incredibly stoned and begged Tyson not to hit him. However, Givens denied this, saying she had simply returned from watching a film with Pitt, and they had never been in bed together.
3.
Adam West and Burt Ward, who played Batman and Robin on the ’60s TV show, were self-professed debaucherous bachelors who slept with multiple women in the same night and “often found that women were banging on our windows while we were bedded down with other women,” according to Ward. West once told a particularly memorable story about an orgy he attended with another costar, Frank Gorshin. The two were apparently kicked out for behaving in character. “We walked in, and it was an orgy. So I immediately went into the Batman character, and Frank went into the Riddler character because we were getting the big giggles,” West recalled. “It was so funny to us, what we walked into. And we were kicked out. We were expelled from the orgy.”
4.
The Beatles, as you might imagine, were also quite debaucherous, and it was apparently common for the Beatles to walk in on each other having sex. Paul McCartney said, “That was the intimacy we had … I’d walked in on John and seen a little bottom bobbing up and down with a girl underneath him. It was perfectly normal: You’d go, ‘Oh … sorry,’ and back out the room.” In fact, George Harrison lost his virginity while the other Beatles watched. Harrison, McCartney, John Lennon, and Pete Best (who used to be the group’s drummer) were all sharing a room while in Germany to perform, and they had bunk beds. “They couldn’t really see anything because I was under the covers, but after I’d finished, they all applauded and cheered. At least they kept quiet while I was doing it,” Harrison remembered.
5.
Oh, and there’s that time Paul McCartney told GQ about him, John Lennon, and some friends all 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.
6.
Speaking of John Lennon, he once claimed he saw a UFO. He said he was lying naked in bed, neither high nor drunk, and looked out the window. “There, as I turned my head, hovering over the next building, no more than a hundred feet away, was this thing with ordinary electric light bulbs flashing on and off ’round the bottom, one non-blinking red light on top,” he recalled. “It was flying (very slow, about 30 m.p.h.) below — I repeat, below — most rooftops. … I never took my eyes off it, but I did scream to a friend who was in another room, ‘Come and look at this.'”
“My friend came running and bore witness with me. Nobody else was around.” Lennon said they tried to take photos, but the film came out blank, and the man they asked to develop it said: “It looked like it had been through the radar at customs.” Lennon says the purported UFO “stayed around for a bit, then sailed off” and that the next day, they called around to papers and the police and heard two others had seen the same thing.
7.
Guillermo del Toro also says he once saw a UFO. “It was horribly designed. I was with a friend. We bought a six-pack. We didn’t consume it, and there was a place called Cerro del Cuatro, ‘Mountain of the Four,’ on the periphery of Guadalajara. We said, ‘Let’s go to the highway.’ We sit down to watch the stars and have the beer and talk. We were the only guys by the freeway. And we saw a light on the horizon going super-fast, not linear. And I said, ‘Honk and flash the lights.’ And we started honking.”
Del Toro says the UFO then “went from 1,000 meters away [to much closer] in less than a second — and it was so crappy. It was a flying saucer, so clichéd, with lights [blinking]. It’s so sad: I wish I could reveal they’re not what you think they are. They are what you think they are. And the fear we felt was so primal. I have never been that scared in my life. We jumped in the car, drove really fast. It was following us, and then I looked back, and it was gone.”
8.
Patrice O’Neal has repeatedly told the story of how he discovered he had diabetes, and it’s…well, you won’t soon forget it. In his Elephant in the Room special, he described it thus: “When we have sex, we’re really, uh… Really dirty, man. We’re really dirty. We pee on each other and the whole…,” he explained, referring to his partner Vondecarlo Brow. “We’re having sex, and then, uh, afterward, she’s like, ‘You know, that was good, but I think we gotta go to the hospital and get you checked out.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ”Cause your pee tastes like birthday cake.'”
9.
Sandra Bullock convinced some of her fellow cast members on Ocean’s 8 (including Cate Blanchett) to partake in one of her favorite facials, which she calls the “penis facial.” She told the story to Ellen in 2018, to the audience’s laughter. “It’s not like I’m lying there with little pieces all over my face,” she explained. “I think when you see how good it is to your face, you too will run to your local facialist and say, ‘Give me the penis.'”
10.
Katy Perry once told a fan a pretty bizarre story about her first time at the Grammys. “One of the first times I went to the Grammys, I got to share a dressing room with Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift,” she recalled. “I asked them for a lock of their hair from each one of them, which is totally creepy but awesome. I put little bows on them individually and put them in my purse. And that was my little secret, and I’m a freak!”
11.
But one of the most bizarre entries on this list has to do with actor, model, and romance cover star Fabio…and a goose. Back in 1999, Fabio was helping promote a new roller coaster at Busch Gardens. By the time the ride was finished, his face was covered in blood — and according to Fabio, it was goose blood.
“So the roller coaster goes down at 80 miles an hour…over a pond and back up, and then upside down,” Fabio described. “So what happened is, over the pond, there was a bunch of geese there. I’m talking about hundreds. And one got sucked in. I saw this very up close. The geese hit the video camera.” Fabio said the video camera shattered and metal cut the bridge of his nose. When the roller coaster turned upside down, the blood got all over his face, which was evident when the ride was over. People thought it was a hoax at the time, as the next day, when headlines came out, was April Fool’s Day. One of the strangest parts? The footage from the camera was never found. “My manager at that time, he said, ‘Oh, let’s see the video footage.’ Well, the camera is never to be found. The tape disappeared.”
12.
In 2017, David Lynch told an even more wild story about his Woody Woodpecker figurines. Apparently, 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???
13.
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.
14.
Bryan Cranston has openly admitted that he had a vision of killing his ex-girlfriend. He met the woman soon after divorcing his first wife, and the two had a “hot and heavy romance” before Cranston broke it off, as she apparently had a drug problem. While working on the soap opera Loving, he accepted an invitation to eat dinner with the woman as friends. However, Cranston quickly realized she thought — or had decided — the two were still in a relationship. She later showed up on the Loving set to confront him over “walking out” on her. Cranston said the relationship “devolved from there” until he had a “vision of killing her.” He recalled, “I went to a different place. They used to call it seeing red. And all you see is emotion, and rage, and fear, and anxiety.”
“The moment that I snapped out of this, she was, in my mind…I had already killed her. And I was so afraid of myself. At that moment that I went, ‘Oh my God, what is happening to me?'” Cranston continued. “I’m so frightened by this woman, this petite woman, five foot two. I mean, just, I just didn’t know what to do.”
15.
Marlon Brando once confronted Michael Jackson about his child sex abuse allegations at his ranch, Neverland. “I had asked him if he was a virgin, and he sort of laughed and giggled. He said, ‘Oh, Brando.’ I said, ‘Well, what do you do for sex?’ And he was acting fussy and embarrassed.”
Brando reportedly told prosecutors during Jackson’s 1994 abuse trial, “He said he hated his father and started to cry. And I said, ‘Well, who are your friends?’ He said, ‘I don’t know anybody my own age. I don’t like anybody my own age.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ He was crying hard enough that…I tried to assuage him. I tried to help him all I could.”
16.
According to director Brett Ratner, however, Michael did have adult friends — namely, him. Ratner once told Jimmy Kimmel a truly strange story about Jackson in an attempt to prove what a funny, practical joker he was. In the story, Ratner recalls Jackson waking him up to go to 7-Eleven to fill up water balloons in the sink. According to Ratner, they then threw the balloons at a man experiencing homelessness. Jackson was also inexplicably in a Hulk mask.
17.
Azalea Banks’ story about being “trapped” at Elon Musk and Grimes’s house lives rent-free in my mind. After Grimes apparently invited Banks to her and Elon’s house to work on music, Banks says she was left alone in their house “for days.” She wrote on Instagram, “I waited around all weekend while grimes coddled her boyfriend for being too stupid to know not to go on twitter on acid,” she said, claiming “it was probably some weird threesome sex shit to begin with.”
Banks’ “too stupid to know not to go on twitter on acid” claim appears to refer to Musk’s posting about taking Tesla private at “$420 a share,” a tweet that led to the Securities and Exchange Commission investigating Musk. Musk denied ever meeting Banks (He later admitted to having caught a glimpse of her at his house, saying he hadn’t realized who it was), and his reps called the claim that he was on acid “complete nonsense.” Banks later apologized for her claim, but not before this all led to a big feud with Grimes, and Banks memorably referred to Elon as “apartheid Clyde.”
18.
Nicolas Cage has more strange stories than anyone on this list, but we’ll only include a few so that he doesn’t take up the entire article. In one story, he was stalked by a mime. “Somehow, this mime would appear on the set of Bringing Out the Dead and start doing strange things,” Cage remembered. “I have no idea how it got past security. Finally, the producers took some action, and I haven’t seen the mime since. But it was definitely unsettling.”
19.
In another wild Cage story, he once dealt with a home invasion from a fan who would frequently break in to wear his clothes while he was busy on set. One night, though, Cage recalls, “I was asleep at 2 in the morning, and my young son at the time was in the other room, and I woke up, and there was a naked man who had gotten my leather jacket, eating a fudgesicle in front of my bed. I woke up, and I used Verbal Judo, and I just said, ‘Get out of my house.'”
20.
Kesha once claimed she had sex with a ghost, telling Conan O’Brien, “to the bone zone with a ghost.” She later walked this back. “I had something wake me up while I was in bed with my boyfriend at the time, and it was a touch down the body,” she recalled. “I woke up and looked at the end of the bed, and there was an apparition of a woman. … I never actually slept with a ghost. But she did wake me up in a very sensual way.”
21.
Johnny Depp’s Rolling Stone profile is a wild ride from start to finish, but we’ll just mention one story here. In it, Depp describes how he once partied at a cheap hotel. After he came home, his roommates started getting really itchy.” Soon, they discovered the mites. “They look like crab-crabs, like from the sea,” Depp recalled. “I gave everyone scabies. You know how hard it is to tell your roommates that? ‘Uh, I got scabies from a hotel room, I swear. Sorry, dude.'” However, he points out, “My roommate couldn’t say much. He was a bank robber.” WHAT? Depp continued, “He was the ponytail bandit. He was 11 and 1, but that one will get you. He only robbed banks in Beverly Hills.”
22.
Speaking of Depp, he almost died in a fiery explosion while staying with Hunter S. Thompson in preparation to film an adaption of Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. While smoking and studying some of Hunter’s notes in the small room in the basement where he slept, Depp said he put his cigarette on an ashtray on the nightstand. “For some reason, I began to examine the nightstand, a barrel of sorts-wooden slats, steel bands, the whole bit,” Depp explained. “As I scrutinized it a bit more, a wave of fear hit me, the likes of which I’d never experienced. My nightstand was a keg of gunpowder.”
Depp says he ran upstairs “as fast as a cheetah” to find Thompson, bringing him back downstairs and showing him the barrel. When Thompson saw it, he said, “Oh, God, that’s where it is! I’ve always wondered what happened to it.” He then informed Depp it was full and that Depp could’ve blown up the whole house with his cigarette.
23.
Perhaps this one is unsurprising, but I feel like there were not enough headlines about Ezra Miller’s disturbing story about their first-grade book report. They chose the Stephen King horror 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,” Miller described. “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.”
24.
And finally, we’ll end with this story about Robert Pattinson attempting to create a portable pasta dish called Piccolini Cuscino — though this is more a story from the interviewer than from Pattinson himself. In this iconic interview with GQ, Pattinson recalls coming up with an idea to give pasta “the same kind of fast food credentials as burgers and pizzas” and answering the question, “How do you make pasta that you can hold in your hand?” He apparently created a prototype with a panini press and met with Sugarfish cofounder Lele Massimini to show him and tell him of his business plan. “His facial expression didn’t even change afterward. Let alone acknowledge what my plan was. There was absolutely no sign of anything from him, literally. And so it kind of put me off a little bit.”
He then tries 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 in which he dumps sugar, crumbled-up cornflakes, sauce, and the presliced cheese. 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 anyway.
“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 puts 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.”