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Michael Jackson Used to Play Childish, Annoying Pranks on ... Russell Crowe?

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | March 30, 2015 |

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | March 30, 2015 |


Over on The Guardian today, they have a terrific profile on Russell Crowe, who is very candid about what he needs for his career out of his directorial debut, The Water Diviner:

“I need it to be commercially successful. I’ve got to return a commercial result on The Water Diviner because that will give me the freedom to do what I want.

That’s all but an admission that Crowe understand that his career is on the skids, and that he needs a commercial hit to resurrect it. I mean, he still appears in big, moneymaking movies (Les Miserables, Man of Steel), but he hasn’t been able to open a movie on his own in a very long time. I’m not so sure that The Water Diviner — about an Australian who man travels to Turkey after the Battle of Gallipoli to try and locate his three missing sons — is the movie that’s going to turn things around for him. He directs and stars, and it’s already a big hit in Australia, but it doesn’t exactly sound like a movie destined for a “commercial result” in America.

Anyway, in addition to talking about that, and about his hot temper, the profile also mentioned prank phone calls that Michael Jackson used to torture Russell Crowe with, and I just thought this was hilarious:

The zenith of Crowe’s fame does sound a bit disturbing in other ways. For one thing, he found himself on the receiving end of repeated nuisance calls from, of all people, Michael Jackson. “For two or three fucking years,” he says. “I never met him, never shook his hand, but he found out the name I stayed in hotels under, so it didn’t matter where I was, he’d ring up do this kind of thing, like you did when you were 10, you know. ‘Is Mr Wall there? Is Mrs Wall there? Are there any Walls there? Then what’s holding the roof up? Ha ha.’ You’re supposed to grow out of doing that, right?”

What? Why in God’s name would Michael Jackson want to prank call Russell Crowe? That’s so random and bizarre, like finding out that the guy who wrote Rounders and The Rock’s Walking Tall also discovered Tracy Chapman. Celebrities don’t make any sense at all. We label you and put you in a box. STAY IN THE BOX.

Source: The Guardian