Celebrity Interviews That Went Terribly Wrong

Tom Cruise is probably the undisputed king of the awkward interview after both his Today show confrontation with Matt Lauer and his jumping-all-over-Oprah's-couch incident, but he's not alone when it comes to cringe-worthy celebrity Q&As. Whether an interviewer intentionally asks provocative questions, or the star maybe just isn't feeling it after a long press junket, it's weirdly satisfying when the cameras record these tense interactions. 

There are even times when the interview has gone so terribly wrong that it resulted in a physical altercation that left one of the participants with lasting health effects. Seriously, it gets real in here. From walkouts, to verbal sparring matches, to a smorgasbord of awkward silences and glaring facial expressions, these celebrity interviews cover the full gamut of cringe. 

Here's a list of celebrities whose press agents probably should have been a little quicker to toss the towel in the ring.

When KTLA Entertainment Reporter Sam Rubin asks Samuel L. Jackson about a Super Bowl commercial he was in, mistaking him for actor Laurence Fishburne, the interview is effectively over. For the next four minutes, Jackson proceeds to eviscerate Rubin, pausing only briefly to respond to Rubin's desperate attempts to redirect the conversation back to Robocop, the film Jackson was supposed to be promoting.

Handing Jackson a moment like this was like tossing a t-bone to a starving pit bull, and the internet devoured it with the same enthusiasm. For his part, Rubin was well aware of what he'd done, saying, "That is a tape that I believe now is going to have a life all of its own" after the interview mercifully ended. If you mean it will make me look like a clown forever and ever, then yes, Sam Rubin, we agree with you 100 percent.

The good news for Rubin: He's not alone. Well, at least among the general public. In an interview of his own, Fishburne says that he gets mistaken for Jackson all the time and has even signed Jackson's autograph when fans ask for it. Fortunately, Fishburne is a pretty good sport about the whole thing, quipping, "It's not a bad problem to have."

While promoting Now You See Me — the movie that tried to make fedora-wearing magicians look like social revolutionaries — Jesse Eisenberg sat down with Romina Puga for a segment of her show, Say My Name. He must have somehow thought he was back on the set of The Social Network because he was in full Zuckerberg mode, rapid-firing insulting quips and japes, even encouraging Romina to cry after they were done by saying, "You are like the Carrot Top of interviewers."

At first, their banter seems playful, and maybe even an attempt at wry humor, but in the course of just under three minutes, Eisenberg ends up looking like a bully. Puga even edited the segment to end with her saying "You're such a jerk." 

Folks wondered it was a failed gag or an actual train wreck of an interview. Puga answered that question with a Tumblr post that confirmed Eisenberg was, indeed, "not very nice." She wrote, "When the five minute 'interview' (more like self-esteem butchering) were [sic] finally over I went behind a curtain to wait for the memory cards from the interview. I peaked around the curtain to ask Jesse about his neighborhood in New York (he lives a few blocks from where I used to live) and he immediately says, 'You're still here?'"

Yeesh, he was still acting like that off camera? Not a good sign.

There were several factors at play that turned actress Cara Delevingne's Good Day Sacramento appearance into the perfect storm of interview awkwardness. 

First, there was her introduction as "Carla." Then, the Good Day hosts ask some vaguely insulting questions, like if Delevingne had read the book that inspired the movie she was promoting and why she seemed "less excited" during this interview than she had been in a previous one. As if that wasn't enough, there was also an annoying satellite delay that left all parties uncomfortably blinking into the camera for several seconds after each response, resulting in the utter failure of multiple attempts at jokes.

In this case, it's the interviewers, sensing what they think is an attitude coming from Delevingne, who decide to throw in the towel. "We'll let you go take a little nap, maybe get a Red Bull. How about that?" asks one of the hosts. Delevingne just sits there smirking for several uncomfortable moments until the satellite feed finally cuts, leaving the interviewers to marvel at how quickly that chat took a tailspin. "She was in a mood!" one of them says, before they all agree that Delevingne was the problem.

Delevingne took to Twitter in her own defense, writing, "Some people just don't understand sarcasm or the British sense of humour." 

What's the creepiest possible way a male celebrity can end a conversation with a female interviewer? If you said, "Calling her sexy multiple times, then crawling on his knees towards her," then you must be Vin Diesel, because we have no idea who else on Earth would even think to do that.

Diesel professes his inappropriate love several times while speaking with YouTube personality Carol Moreira to promote xXx: Return of Xander Cage. Moreira, who later told E! News that the encounter with the action star left her "completely uncomfortable," also said, "I did not like it. At the time I did not know how to react, but you will see that I was uncomfortable, it was not nice that he interrupted my work."

Diesel's best attempt at an apology was to post the "uncut" version of the interview on Facebook with the caption, "As you all know, I try to keep my interviews playful and fun, especially when I am in the Xander Zone ... But if I offended anyone, then let me apologize, because that is never my intention."

Need an added layer of gross to the story? Diesel did all of this in spite of having a long-time girlfriend, Paloma Jiménez, with whom he shares two daughters. Ugh. We are definitely not Groot on this one.

How do we not include the "slavery was a choice" interview? That's right, for those of you living in caves, Kanye went on TMZ Live in May 2018 in an attempt to explain his new experiment with "free thought," a concept he was practicing on his Twitter account. During the chaotic, stream-of-consciousness interview, which you can watch here if you have 30 minutes and a handy supply of Excedrin, Kanye muses on everything from "mental imprisonment," to his liposuction procedure and resulting opioid addiction, to the aforementioned slavery remark. 

His exact quote was "When you hear about slavery for 400 years — for 400 years? That sound like a choice. Like, you was there for 400 years and it's all of y'all?" The statement was so objectively outrageous, a TMZ staffer named Van Lathan called Kanye out on the spot.

Afterward, Kanye took to Twitter to clarify. In a series of since-deleted tweets, he attempted to explain that he was referring to "mental enslavement." In a tweet from that batch that remains live, Kanye wrote, "the universe has a plan. I knew that TMZ would be awesome." It certainly was. We're just not sure it was in the way Kanye thinks it was.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy is a UK reporter who's increasingly made a name for himself as a button-pusher, and he got on Robert Downey Jr.'s bad side in 2015, causing the normally congenial star to abruptly end the interview and leave after repeated, extremely personal questions about his so called "dark times." On his way out the door, Downey Jr. calls Guru-Murthy a "schmuck." 

During a later Howard Stern appearance, the actor was less diplomatic when reliving the uncomfortable moment, calling Guru-Murthy a "syphilitic parasite" and a "clown."  

Yes, it is sometimes the job of a journalist to expose facts that the public needs to know, but it's basically common knowledge at this point that the Iron Man star has a checkered past that involves drug use and jail time. To add insult to injury, the tense interview with Guru-Murthy occurred during a press event for Avengers: Age of Ultron during which the stars were reportedly allotted 5-10 minute slots with news outlets for the expressed purpose of promoting the film.

Now, obviously, we don't work for Marvel, but we're pretty sure the studio would rather have the tent-pole star of its cinematic universe talking about how cool it is to be Iron Man, instead of, say, that time he got arrested for heroin possession. Call it a hunch.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy actually got off relatively light with Robert Downey Jr., because the journalist got himself pummeled with return fire from director Quentin Tarantino after attempting to draw a corollary between violent films — of which Tarantino has made many — and mass shootings. The interview took place during promotion for the director's Django Unchained – which has no shortage of violence. As Guru-Murthy repeatedly attempts to discuss a potential correlation, Tarantino simply declares, "And I'm shutting your butt down." 

For his part, Tarantino made it abundantly clear that he'd already spoken on the subject at length since the start of his career, and that his only intention for Guru-Murthy's interview was to sell his movie. We're pretty sure if you reached into Tarantino's back pocket at that moment, you'd see that his wallet had Bad Mo — well, you know where we're going with that.

Jessica "Is this chicken or tuna?" Simpson has always been kind of an interview wildcard, like in the this supposedly drunk interview with Extra that has been miraculously scrubbed from the internet. So when she returned to the spotlight with a 2017 Ellen appearance, she did not disappoint.

In the first 20 seconds, Simpson literally said, "We got an IUD ... Nothing's gonna get in that uterus," in response to Ellen's joke about her being pregnant for her last two interviews on the show. From there, the singer-turned- fashion designer struggled to give cogent responses for questions such as how long she's been married and what kind of things she likes to do with her husband, former NFL quarterback Eric Johnson. She also made the bold, if not bizarrely unbelievable claim that Johnson is able to massage her back in his sleep.

Simpson's demeanor was so strange it derailed the reliably quick-witted Ellen, who resorted to just helplessly staring into the camera at several points. If we're being honest here, Simpson seems to embrace a kind of ditzy persona even in her best moments, so maybe it would be more accurate to describe this interview as having gone "terribly on brand" rather than "terribly wrong."

Australia's version of 60 Minutes knew exactly what it had on its hands when a 2011 interview with Sarah "Fergie" Ferguson, Duchess of York, took a turn for the worse. The problem arose after the show made Fergie re-watch the incriminating 2010 undercover footage that allegedly showed her offering to "open doors" to her ex-husband, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, in exchange for a £500,000 payment from a reporter posing as "an international business tycoon."

Though she didn't face legal repercussions, the fallout from the scandal included Fergie not getting an invitation to Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding or Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's nuptials and a lengthy lawsuit. It's not surprising Fergie didn't want to relive that moment it in front of the camera, so she stormed off the set. The show's producers capitalized on the moment by making it the centerpiece of its promo and billing it as "the weirdest interview you'll ever see."

In reality, Fergie eventually returned to the show and completed what her manager, John Scott, told The Telegraph was "a banal interview and her demeanour reflected that." Her handler described the showing of the undercover footage as an ambush and "entrapment," an allegation the program's executive producer, Hamish Thomson, scoffed at. "She agreed to talk about the issue, as she has already extensively done, so it certainly wasn't entrapment."

Geez, who knew asking a disgraced former member of the royal family to relive one of her most embarrassing moments wouldn't go over well, huh?

Okay, so a legal deposition isn't exactly a "celebrity interview" per se, but when Justin Bieber was deposed by a lawyer representing a photographer accusing Bieber's security team of assault, the pop singer was asked many questions, which he answered, so we're saying this counts. And the reason we're so anxious to use this incident is because there might never be a better example of snide, bratty entitlement than this particular performance delivered by the Biebs.

From winking at the camera, to wagging his finger, to pretending to sleep, to his outburst over the mention of ex-girlfriend Selena Gomez, Bieber's deposition is the adult equivalent to throwing a temper tantrum in the cereal aisle when mom says you can't get Cookie Crisp.

What's worse is that after clips of the deposition were aired by TMZ, Bieber's lawyers claimed the entire thing was "a setup" designed to evoke a certain kind of response from the pop star in order to then turn around and sell the tape to a tabloid. Of course, that begs the question: "Gee, we wonder how in the world anyone would have known that Bieber would transform into Veruca Salt the second things weren't going his way?"

Sadly, legendary comedian Joan Rivers has passed, but if she was still around, we would offer the following advice to any of her potential interviewers: First, know who you're talking to. Rivers courted controversy her entire career and was a trailblazer in both comedy and television. Second, don't act appalled when someone like Rivers agrees to come on your show to promote a book, then isn't particularly thrilled when you frame each question by invoking media controversies from the past.

That's exactly what CNN's Fredricka Whitfield does when she peppers Rivers with questions about her "mean" humor, controversial joke topics, and furs. Rivers isn't having it, and she immediately pushes back, accusing Whitfield of "going negative" and saying, "You are not the one to interview a person who does humor." With that, Rivers leaves the set. An astonished Whitfield tries to say that she thought Rivers "was joking the whole time."

We wonder which part of Rivers slamming her book on the table, accusing Whitfield of hypocrisy, and telling her to "shut up" was the part she thought was the big punchline?

Unfortunately for UK radio personality Jamie Edwards, his morning show enthusiasm was no match for Bruce Willis' well-known pretension when it came to an uncomfortable promotional interview for Red 2. Alongside Mary-Louise Parker, whose blank-eyed goofiness was not helping matters at all, Willis approached each of Edwards' questions with an increasing level of boredom and disgust.

Afterward, Edwards explained to HLN that he was simply trying to get a soundbite from the interview to use for promotional purposes for the radio station where he worked, and boy, did that ever happen when Willis, out of the blue, made a suicide joke. Edwards asks the actor how he'd prefer to sell the movie, and Willis responds, "I wouldn't, I'd slash my hooves." Yikes. 

In all seriousness, please Bruce, don't actually go through with it. We don't want to imagine a world where you don't resentfully slog your way through more Die Hard sequels with the enthusiasm of a teenage cashier. 

Comedian and talk show host Chelsea Handler isn't one to hold back, and she certainly pulled no punches during a 2014 interview on Piers Morgan's now defunct CNN show when she literally told the British host, "You're a terrible interviewer."

During the awkward but curiously amicable interview, Handler repeatedly slags Morgan over everything from his lack of attention span, to his unfunny Twitter presence, to his decision to end the whole thing by showing her footage of controversial news figure George Zimmerman signing autographs at a gun show. "Thanks for ending on such a high note," she says, before sarcastically telling Morgan, "You're so handsome." 

As if the entire interview isn't cringe-worthy enough, the whole thing was overshadowed by the fact that it had already been announced one month prior that Morgan's show was being cancelled. Handler brought that up, too. When Morgan claims he only stops paying attention to his guests when they're uninteresting, Handler quips, "Well, maybe that's why your job is coming to an end." 

Canadian news anchor Nathan Downer nearly found himself in a John Stossel situation after he enraged Mike Tyson with a question about his shady past. Citing the controversy surrounding Tyson's meeting with disgraced Toronto mayor Rob Ford, Downer asks Tyson if he thinks people have a problem with it because Tyson is a "convicted rapist."

Tyson treats the question like it's Evander Holyfield's ear, which is to say that he latches on and doesn't let go. His promoter, seated beside him, gamely tries to diffuse the situation, but a clearly incensed former heavyweight champ interrupts with this observation about Downer: "You know, it's so interesting, because you come across like a nice guy but you're really a piece of s**t."

The cursing escalates from there, despite Downer's warning that they're on live TV. "I don't care, what are you going to do about it?" Tyson responds. Downer stops the interview a minute later amid another hail of obscenities. Downer thanks Tyson for his time, to which the boxer replies, "F**k you."

Amazingly, Downer later tweeted, then deleted (via The New York Post): "No ill will toward Mike Tyson. He lashed out at me and that's okay. Not taking it personally." Seriously though, did anyone else sweat like Liam Gallagher while watching that clip, or was it just us?

Liam Gallagher, one half of the brother duo that founded and subsequently disbanded the rock band Oasis, stopped by The Graham Norton Show in 2017 to promote his solo album. During the sweaty, antsy, yet hilarious exchange, Liam touched on everything from his contentious Twitter account, his hatred of saxophones, and his endless feud with his brother Noel — "It's well for real ... we don't like each other, man," he says. 

Throughout the unbelievable six-minute barrage of awkward, Gallagher is wearing a heavy black coat, which he does not remove, even though it's clearly causing him to break out in a heavy flop sweat. The whole segment wraps after another panel guest, Idris Elba, tells a story about how he and Gallagher had a bit of a "fallout" after Gallagher once "threw his hat across a bar."

We're confident we did our job here, but if this description doesn't sound awkward enough, go ahead and check out fellow panel guest Chris Rock's face at this exact moment — See? We weren't lying.

There are plenty of contentious interviews on this list, but none come close to the physical confrontation that happens between then-20/20 reporter John Stossel and former WWF wrestler Dave "Dr. D" Schultz. After Stossel tells Schultz that he thinks pro wrestling is fake — Shocker! — Schultz proceeds to IRL slap Stossel on both ears, causing Stossel to literally run away from the interview.

Stossel later claimed he had permanent ear damage from the assault and threatened to sue Schultz, who was subsequently fired from the company that managed WWF. According to The New York Times, Schultz was also fined and suspended by the New York State Athletic Commission. Stossel was supposedly paid a $425,000 settlement by WWF owner Vince McMahon, but the controversy doesn't end there.

Schultz later claimed McMahon put him up to the assault in order to make an example out of Stossel, because his investigation into pro wrestling was "making a joke out of the business." Schultz also claimed McMahon set him up to take the fall by arranging another reporter-slapping incident in Japan, then lied in his depositions, claiming he didn't direct Schultz to hit anyone.

After being ousted from professional wrestling, Schultz became a bounty hunter. Stossel continued his investigative journalism, but we just want to know: Does he still think wrestling is fake?  

The fact that almost everything Steve-O does is tough to watch makes it kind of difficult to nail down a specific time when it went "terribly wrong" with him, but we feel like his trainwreck of a booze-soaked interview with Adam Carolla fits the bill nicely.

As you can see from the above clip of the September 2005 episode of Too Late with Adam Carolla, Steve-O "had a couple glasses of chardonnay," as Carolla puts it. Carolla then admits that the show supplied Steve-O with the booze, and, recognizing that his guest is too hammered to do the stunt he came on the show to perform, Carolla tries to calm down the increasingly out-of-control Steve-O enough to field a few phone calls.

Instead, Steve-O tries to tackle Carolla out of his chair, screams repeated obscenities, and smashes his foot through a glass coffee table, cutting himself in the process. It's actually pretty sad to watch, considering it's just regrettable addict behavior being normalized by a celebrity, but thankfully, Steve-O has, as of this writing, enjoyed a decade of sobriety.

Though Oscar-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones' legendary curmudgeonliness proceeds him, it never stops being amazing when an interview with him goes terribly wrong. And in the case of the promotional junket for Men in Black 3, everyone's favorite Hollywood grump was in rare form.

In this mashup of cringe-worthy moments between Jones and film journalists Paul Christensen and Kevin McCarthy, the veteran actor delivers an equal mix of outright contempt and confusion in response to their admittedly dubious questions. For example, when Christensen suggests that Josh Brolin, who plays a younger version of Jones' Agent K in the film, is actually doing an impression of Jones, Jones replies with, "He's not playing me, no of course not. That's not very good thinking."

Taking an oddly existential route, McCarthy asks Jones what advice he would give himself if he could go back in time to visit his younger self on a set. "I don't have a clue," Jones answers, after picking at the skin around his eye for an agonizing few seconds. Finally, exasperated with McCarthy's philosophical line of questioning, Jones utters, "My mind just cannot get around a question like that. I don't know."

It is a master class in surliness of which our humble description does no justice. Please just watch and enjoy.

During The Boxmasters' 2009 tour of canada, the "modbilly" band made news at a press stop for the CBC show, Radio Q. If you're thinking, "Who the heck are The Boxmasters?" you would be totally justified since we failed to mention right up front that they are actor Billy Bob Thornton's band. Radio Q host, Jian Ghomeshi, attempted to make that very distinction, and inadvertently caused the whole interview to go off the rails.

You see, Thornton asked that the band not be introduced by way of his acting career, so when Ghomeshi ignored that request, in order to justifiably provide context for his audience who likely had no clue who this band was, Thornton melted down into what can best be described as a moody teenager doing an impression of every character Billy Bob Thronton has ever played. He seethes, sulks, and curses his way through every question before finally insulting Canadian rock audiences by calling them "mashed potatoes without the gravy."

The interview went viral, and after a raucous Toronto crowd rejected Thronton's attempt to explain himself by chanting "Here comes the gravy," The Boxmasters cancelled their remaining Canadian tour dates. Thornton later appeared on The Jim and Sam Show where he was unapologetic. The lesson here? Do not insult the gravy of the Great White North.  

Gene Simmons seemingly approached his Fresh Air interview on NPR from the perspective of a wolf being welcomed into the hen house. With the first question out of host Terry Gross' mouth, Simmons began lobbing objectionable responses that ranged from being overtly sexual to just plain insulting. Simmons seems to be attack Gross and NPR for having a liberal slant with which he clearly disagrees, so he treats the interview like he's some sort of conservative counter-agent on a mission to destroy.

Instead, Simmons ends up coming off as a combative jerk who constantly references how allegedly irresistible he is to women. Surprisingly, Gross hangs on for almost 27 minutes (her interviews are usually a full hour), even giving Simmons a chance to redeem himself with her final question. She asks if his obnoxiousness could be chalked up to a persona that he created — if he's acting out for the interview. 

Simmons does not waver, instead choosing to fire a parting shot. He tells Gross that she is "a boring lady," which is amazing coming from a guy whose band has been performing essentially the same show since the '70s.

You're probably familiar with the classic 2010 Kanye West Today show interview in which the rapper and fashion designer scolds the production staff for doing the most routine thing a morning show could possibly do: run video of the subject being discussed. "Please don't let that happen again, it's like ridiculous," Yeezy famously remarks.

Fast-forward six years when the "Stronger" rapper appeared on Ellen. Everything starts out fine until Ellen jokes about Kanye's tweet asking Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for money. What follows is a six-minute rant about how West feels like if he had the appropriate resources, he and his multi-dimensional artist peers — whom he likens to Picasso, Steve Jobs, and Walt Disney — could change the world. Oh, and he also curses so many times, he probably holds the record for bleeps on a daytime talk show.

All Ellen can do is just sit there as West turns completely away from her, speaks directly to the audience, into the camera, and seemingly just off into space at times, switching back and forth from his maniacal shouting voice to his hushed, inspirational whisper. It is a tour-de-force of Kanye West being Kanye West — the likes of which an audience full of folks just hoping to go home with some free Beats headphones probably weren't prepared for.

"I'm sorry for the realness," West says to end his rant. Don't you be sorry for your realness, Kanye. Don't you ever be sorry.   

During Kanye West's 2013 chat with DJ Zane Lowe for BBC Radio 1, Lowe manages to eek out some questions during a full hour of the rapper rambling about everything from his claim that he invented leather jogging pants, to his battle with classism, to how he's just like the "glitch" in Wreck-It Ralph — whatever that means.

West describes himself to Lowe in this way: "I'm a postmodernist, as best as a career. I'm a futurist, mentally." Lowe agrees, because what else can he do? The "Gold Digger" rapper goes on to explain that the internet is like "the sky" from "future movies," meaning all of society's advancements can be found there, but it just hasn't evolved to that point yet. "They will play this interview in five years," West says. "They will play this interview in ten years and say, he called that, he called that, he called that, he said that was going to happen, that was going to change."

As of this writing, it's been a little more than five years, and people are still trying to figure out exactly what West was talking about, but perhaps Lowe put it best when he wrapped up the interview by saying, "Oh my god, that was the most intense f***ing interview in my life."

Rapper Cardi B is known for her, shall we say, unfiltered approach to life. This is, after all, the woman who once said to Giuliana Rancic on the Grammy's red carpet, "I'm feeling good, I'm feeling nervous, overwhelmed — everything! Butterflies in my stomach and vagina!" So, with that in mind, imagine how the overly excitable host of The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon, was in her presence.

Actually, you don't have to imagine. You can watch Fallon be completely flabbergasted by the "Bodak Yellow" rapper in this interview from December 2017. Thanks to Cardi B's preference for peppering everything she says with bizarre sound effects — seriously, check out her weird meow/moan at the :06 second mark — Fallon was constantly thrown off his game, stopping several times to pause and collect himself. By the end of the interview, Fallon simply giggled and chirped back at the "Pull Up" rapper as she dominated the segment with one-liners and zoo noises. It's a tour-de-force of wackiness, and one that deserves a watch. Enjoy.

Perhaps it's a bit of a stretch to say that this interview went "terribly wrong," unless you count an actor turning what is essentially a promotional opportunity into a real-life Tinder session. That's exactly what happened when Avengers: Infinity War star Sebastian Stan repeatedly crushed on Sharon Stone throughout his May 2016 interview on The Late Late Show with James Corden. At one point, the Romanian-born actor even tossed out a pick-up line in his native tongue.  

The full interview is no longer available but a YouTuber helpfully edited together the cringey highlights of Stan swooning hard for the Basic Instinct star. When it became awkwardly clear that Stan's advances were more than just polite talk show patter, Corden couldn't contain himself, shouting, "You're a joke — You're ridiculous! You're finally going for it. ... I love it!" At another point, Corden says, "I feel weird being here. I feel like I could cut this with a knife, it's crazy."

We have no clue if a real-life romance ever blossomed between Stone and Stan, but one thing we learned without a doubt is that there needs to be a Romanian Sebastian Stan dating show on the air ... starting yesterday.

In what had to be some sort of record, it only took one minute for eccentric actor Shia LaBeouf to completely derail this interview with Fox 5 entertainment reporter Kevin McCarthy. First of all, this was a red carpet event, so reporters had extremely limited time, if any, with the stars. McCarthy blew a good chunk of his by attempting to reminisce with LaBeouf about a previous interview (most likely this one from three years before), of which LaBeouf seemed to have no memory.

From there, a seemingly sedate LaBeouf gave clipped answers to McCarthy's admittedly odd questions, like "Can you be entertained by the movies that you're in?" and "Where is the balance of safety versus being realistic to the character?" At one point, LaBeouf even distractedly answered a question while looking over McCarthy's shoulder and air-kissing someone standing behind the reporter. The interview mercifully ended when a woman who appeared to be LaBeouf's publicist intervened. However, if she was attempting to save this trainwreck, she came in about 60 seconds too late.

It's not often that you get to see a mainstream star like Mark Wahlberg get completely smashed on TV, but that's precisely what happened when the Boogie Nights actor popped into The Graham Norton Show in 2013. Wahlberg even signalled his own demise at the start of the interview when he chastised Norton for allowing guests to drink on the show. "It's a recipe for disaster," Wahlberg very accurately predicted.

By the end of the interview, Wahlberg had done all of the following: blatantly hit on fellow guest Sarah Silverman, fully groped Graham Norton's chest — including a nipple tweak — while sitting on his lap, challenged fellow guest Michael Fassbender to a "big d**k contest," and repeatedly interrupted everyone.  

Producers of the show later said that, although they knew Wahlberg was drinking in the green room, he seemed fine to go on. But then, "about a quarter of an hour in, something clicked," they said, and Wahlberg ended up "not quite in the right place." That has to be the nicest possible way to describe behavior that would normally get one kicked out of a house party, let alone a popular TV show.

During a panel interview to promote their 2011 rom-com, Friends With Benefits, Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake tangoed with a Russian reporter who had thoughts about Timberlake's acting career. When the reporter asked, in Russian, why Timberlake felt the need to jump from "showbiz" to movies, Kunis intervened to tackle the perceived slight on her co-star's behalf. And she also happened to do it in fluent Russian.

The Ukrainian-born Kunis clapped back hard, asking, "Well, what would you rather have him do?" When the reporter continued her strange line of questioning, asking, "Isn't showbiz enough?" Kunis shot back, "What kind of question is that? Why are you here?"

Perhaps the most awkward part of the whole thing was how Timberlake sat by, perplexed, as he tried to keep up with the delayed translation in his earpiece. Eventually he just resigned himself to let Kunis and the reporter battle it out in their native Slavic tongue, telling the crowd that Kunis was his "bodyguard."

In 1988, singer James Brown was accused by his wife, Adrienne, of subjecting her to a terrifying domestic assault. According to People, Adrienne claimed that Brown beat her "with a metal mop handle," and fired a rifle at her multiple times while she was driving. Shortly after he bonded out of jail following his arrest for the incident, Brown did a completely bonkers interview on CNN.

Instead of addressing the very serious charges he faced, Brown proceeded to sing, ramble incoherently, and at one point, get out of his seat and start to dance. Perhaps the most unbelievable part of the segment is when the interviewer actually asked Brown about his then-pending divorce proceedings by saying, "Does that mean that you're now eligible?"

Brown responded, "I'm single ... I wanna mingle." Then he described why "the ladies love him so much when he gets out there," by saying, "Because I look good, I smell good, I feel good ... and make love good."  

And we didn't even describe Brown's clothing yet, which happened to be yellow-tinted protective goggles, a silk scarf, and maroon leather gloves. Absurd doesn't even begin to describe this whole scenario that was so insane comedian Jordan Peele did a verbatim version of it for the YouTube comedy channel JASH.

KISS frontman Gene Simmons also makes this list more than once, thanks to his curious decision to joke about his past romantic conquests right in front of his longtime partner, Shannon Tweed. Any guy, even a legendary lothario like Simmons, should know that even if he's been extremely open about the ladies of his past, his current partner doesn't want to hear about them. And she certainly doesn't want to hear him goofing about how his "shmeckle" is now worse for the wear.

Tweed ended up walking off the set of The Joy Behar Show after Simmons' crack, but it was already going terribly in the moments before that. Redirecting every topic back to Simmons' "philandering ways," Tweed seemed like the only reason she showed up at all was to put her longtime boyfriend on blast. A perplexed Joy Behar even said at one point, "I don't know what's going on here."

The segment ends with Simmons repeatedly pleading for Tweed to "come back," and it's painfully clear that he's referring to both the interview and their relationship in general. Something tells us Terry Gross has this on saved on her DVR.

It actually wasn't the single, awkward question about plastic surgery that turned this Megyn Kelly Today interview with actress Jane Fonda into a full-blown trainwreck, but, rather, the lasting feud it ignited afterwards. Granted, Fonda's ice-cold glare at Kelly was about as cringeworthy as daytime TV gets, but it was her subsequent shading of the talk show host that cranked this thing up to 11.

In multiple interviews after the "glare meme'd round the internet," Fonda would go on to say Kelly's question was "weird" and "so inappropriate." She even returned to Today and jabbed at Kelly again, eliciting shocked responses from Kelly's colleagues, Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie.

Not to be outdone, Kelly swung back hard with a segment called "A word on Jane Fonda," which can only be described as a scorched-earth approach to this feud. After highlighting several notable instances when Fonda previously discussed her plastic surgery, Kelly went for the kill by unearthing the decades-old controversy over Fonda's remarks during her protest of the Vietnam War. Yeesh.

There are interviews that go terribly wrong, and then there's whatever you call it when two celebrities start attacking each other on the air like bitter political rivals.

While it's understandable to be intimidated upon meeting an intense actor like Samuel L. Jackson for the first time, that is no excuse for the apparently rushed and/or non-existent prep that went into this MovieZine interview.

Reporter Carl Adam Anderberg revealed his folly right off the bat when he told Jackson, "We had our readers send in questions for you, so I'm just going to go through them." Great. Isn't this already Reddit AMA's thing? Anyway, Anderberg stuck with the concept to his own demise, droning out boring, cliché questions like, "Which character have you enjoyed playing the most in your career?"

Jackson seemed to treat the whole experience with the dangerous bemusement of a cat batting around its prey before the kill strike. And that deadly moment nearly happened when Anderberg attempted to bait Jackson into a conversation about the critically skewered Star Wars prequels. But Jackson kept his cool through the terribly awkward four and a half minutes, which Anderberg brought to a close by nearly cutting off Jackson's final answer to say, "Alright, I think we're done." Couldn't have said it better ourselves.

After a long hiatus from the movie biz following his DUI arrest and subsequent anti-semitic remarks scandal, action star Mel Gibson returned to the screen with the revenge thriller Edge of Darkness. And with any new film comes the inevitable press tour and celebrity interviews, for which, to put it mildly, Gibson did not seem prepared at all.

Instead of having appropriate responses to the inevitable questions about the scandal, Gibson seemed surprised and irritated that reporters would even bring it up. In an interview with WGN-TV, he even got caught calling the reporter an "a**hole" after thinking their segment had already ended. But it was his interview with KTLA's entertainment reporter, Sam Rubin, that really raised eyebrows.

Asked by Rubin whether he felt some detractors would have a problem with his return, Gibson asked Rubin, "You have a dog in this fight?" Rubin, who is Jewish, said that he didn't understand Gibson's question in the moment but later realized it to be an offensive suggestion on account of his religious beliefs. Regardless of what Gibson actually meant by the remark, his nearly instant rage at being asked to address the scandal was not a good look, even for an actor who's made a career out of portraying tough guys. 

Attention actors who hate doing promotional press: Liam Neeson figured out how to never do that again, thanks to an inexplicably disturbing story he told the Independent in a February 2019 interview.

While discussing his revenge-based thriller Cold Pursuit, Neeson recalled his personal experience with desired vengeance. He claimed that after he learned an unidentified woman in his life was raped by "a black person," he "went up and down areas with a cosh (a blunt weapon)," waiting for a "black bastard [to] ... have a go at [him] ... so that [he] could kill him." The confession, which Neeson admitted was "awful," became the centerpoint of the brief, 17-minute interview. The action star seemed to know this would happen, as he almost immediately lamented, "I've never admitted that, and I'm saying it to a journalist. God forbid."

There's no word yet on God's take, but the internet forbade it plenty. And instead of discussing the actual film being promoted, the Independent focused on opinions from professionals in the field of sexual violence and psychology to attempt to put Neeson's comments into context. But perhaps Neeson's Cold Pursuit costar Tom Bateman, who was also present, summed the whole thing up the best by saying, "Holy s**t."

One day after the Independent interview dropped, Neeson appeared on GMA to insist he "is not a racist," but that it's important for people to "open up" about hidden racist tendencies they may have hiding just below "the surface."