6 Famous People Who Hilariously Trolled Their Own Fans
Some celebrities see fame as tremendous burden and distraction from their craft, whereas others treat it as a golden opportunity to screw with thousands of strangers for no logical reason.
Some celebrities see fame as tremendous burden and distraction from their craft, whereas others treat it as a golden opportunity to screw with thousands of strangers for no logical reason save "shits and giggles." We're talking about such famous rascals as ...
6. Chris Pratt Trolls His Fans With Bad Jennifer Lawrence Photos
Hollywood certainly made a weird choice when it needed a hot new action star and decided to pick that zaftig fellow from Parks And Rec. During the press tour for the 2016 science fiction thriller Passengers, which starred Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, fans got overly enthusiastic about the pairing and started "shipping" them. (For those who aren't up to speed on the internet lingo, that means they want the two to hook up and mash their bits together and make babies.) Followers of Pratt's Instagram account started demanding that he take more photos of himself hanging out with Lawrence so that they could satisfy their vicarious need to imagine these two millionaires spending time with each other.
And so Pratt proceeded to do what the fans were demanding:
Over the next few days, Pratt went on to post a number of Instagram selfies featuring himself and Lawrence together. Technically.
The millions of fans shipping Pratt and Mega Man were overjoyed with this one.
You can't argue that he didn't give the fans exactly what they'd asked for. Still, a bunch of them didn't seem to appreciate the photos, leaving comments like "Why isn't she ever full in the pic" or "Why you cut Jennifer out?" Some people are simply impossible to please.
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5. Nirvana Would Fuck Up Their Live Shows In Delightfully Stupid Ways
Nirvana are much better-known for their catchy grunge tunes than for Kurt Cobain's primal screaming, but it's not like he was intentionally trying to ruin the songs. Unless he was playing live, that is. Here's a compilation of clips of Cobain mumbling into the microphone, or putting on a fake stupid accent, or sometimes replacing his lyrics with caveman grunts:
It's more or less the Charlie Brown teacher voice.
Sometimes, his reasons for messing with the audience were almost admirable. In 1992, for instance, Nirvana was booked to play a show in a packed stadium in Buenos Aires. The opening act, an all-girl band called Calamity Jane, had an extremely negative reception, getting pelted with mud and bottles from the audience. This pissed Cobain off, and he considered cancelling the performance, but bassist Krist Novoselic talked him into a compromise -- they'd take the stage and do an incredibly shitty job. And so, rather than play any of their hits, the band began the opening riffs for songs like "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or "Come As You Are," and then broke into renditions of their least-known songs, predominantly from their worst-rated album, Incesticide. As a finale, they did wind up finally playing a track from Nevermind -- the hidden instrumental one at the end that you hear if you accidentally forget to stop the CD after ten minutes. The audience was furious. Cobain called it "one of the greatest experiences I've ever had."
That wasn't Nirvana's first foray into deliberately messing up their shows. A year earlier, they were invited to perform on the British show Top Of The Pops, but after agreeing, they found out that the show had a policy of playing the music pre-recorded and only the singer's voice live. As a response, Cobain sang "Smells Like Teen Spirit" like Christopher Walken with his mouth full of marshmallows, the whole time pretending to play his guitar with an open hand like a robotic Disneyland attraction.
On top of all that, there's the band's remarkable disdain for their most famous song, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" -- which was intended as a joke, a mockingly generic pop song full of nonsense lyrics and a guitar riff openly stolen from Boston's "More Than A Feeling." They hated that it became popular and resented playing it so much that, fairly often, they would rile up the crowd by playing the opening riff, and then instead launch into ... a bad cover of "More Than A Feeling".
4. Kiefer Sutherland Started Saying "Dammit!" More Often In 24 To Mess With Fans Playing A Drinking Game
24 may have been massively successful and popular, but nobody, from the fans to the producers to the stars, was ever under the impression that it was anything but a TV show based on a gimmick and starring one-note characters and cheap dialogue. It's entertainment in the same way that Pringles is food -- they don't have to pretend it's wholesome.
So when fans of the series endearingly mocked its hacky writing, the creators weren't too proud to play along. Fans put together a drinking game in which you take a shot whenever Jack Bauer repeats one of his ten or so go-to lines, like demanding to know who someone is working for, saying the word "protocols," or yelling "Dammit!" whenever something irked him:
In a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone, Sutherland revealed that he'd caught wind of the game and decided to have some fun with it. So in one episode, he made it a mission to say "Dammit!" as many times as he possibly could, even sneaking three into the same scene. In his words: "Boom, boom, boom. And that was just one scene. By the end, there had to be fourteen 'Damn its.' And I could just see all these college kids going, 'Oh, fuck!'" (Which, incidentally, is what Jack would say if this show aired on cable.)
Now, this is the internet, so of course there's a Wiki page cataloging every single "dammit" uttered on the show. Sutherland's claim appears to be an exaggeration (his record was four d-bombs in one episode), but it's true that the show got more liberal with the word as it went along -- the penultimate season has 47 "dammits" between Jack and company, compared to the measly 30 in the first.
3. Mythbusters' Adam Savage Is Always Flamboyantly Lurking At Comic-Con
It's probably not shocking to point out that Adam Savage, the non-walrus-stache half of Mythbusters, is kind of a nerd. What is shocking is that if you're a dedicated nerd yourself, you might have met him without even knowing it.
Savage attends the San Diego Comic-Con every year, always wearing an elaborate costume which completely obscures his identity and prevents myth-busting enthusiasts from showering him with questions. He started in 2013 with an Admiral Ackbar costume (including an original mask from Return Of The Jedi), then topped that the next year with an exact replica of the original Alien spacesuit, complete with a facehugger model to cover his face. It was so hot that it required him to wear an ice vest to keep from passing out from heat exhaustion.
In 2015, he attended in a bespoke Judge Dredd costume, though he made himself somewhat easier to recognize by refusing to shave his trademark blonde goatee. On the next year, he went as the main character of the Oscar-winning Leonardo-DiCaprio-mauled-by-a-bear movie The Revenant -- that's right, he dressed up as the bear.
And finally, in 2017, he went as King Arthur, in armor made by the actual costume designer from the 1981 movie Excalibur, with chain mail made for the Lord Of The Rings series underneath. He could have gone as Arthur from the Guy Ritchie movie that came out two months earlier, but everyone had already forgotten that.
Every year, Savage challenges fans to figure out which of the Comic-Con attendees is secretly him, and rewards them with bonuses like free tickets to his panel. And every year, at least one person figures it out, probably by whittling down the number of identity-obscuring cosplayers whose costume could only be put together if someone was earning Mythbusters dollars.
2. The Dallas Stars Wouldn't Stop Playing Nickelback
Americans don't care about ice hockey nearly as much as Canadians do, but that doesn't mean they don't have their own league. You can catch up on what's going on with the NHL late at night on Fox Sports on a slow day. Well, if you're not a fan, you might have missed the 2015 home game between the Dallas Stars and the Vancouver Canucks, during which the Stars decided that instead of playing "We Will Rock You" or "Seven Nation Army" to hype up the audience, they would only play Nickelback. Again and again. For the entire game.
Presumably, the intention was to troll Vancouver's visiting fans. Nickelback is, after all, a ( perhaps inexplicably) widely despised band from Vancouver. Unfortunately, there were as many if not more Dallas fans in attendance, who were just as annoyed by the sonic assault as the Vancouver visitors.
Toward the end of the game, the scoreboard displayed a graphic asking fans to text which artist they'd prefer never to hear again at a hockey game, providing three "options:" A) Nickelback, B) Nickelback, or C) Nickelback. It didn't matter that the number was fake, because one answer was the clear winner (B, obviously). And in case you were wondering, yeah, Dallas won.
1. Guardians Of The Galaxy's Michael Rooker Showed Up On The Set Of Avengers: Infinity War Just To Mess With Marvel Fans
If you haven't seen the second Guardians Of The Galaxy movie yet but intend to, then first of all, what are you waiting for? Secondly, this entry is going to have spoilers for that film. So either stop reading or see the damn movie already.
In early 2017, Marvel Studios started shooting Avengers: Infinity War, the long-awaited film that will see the 200 or so characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe come together. At the same time, Guardians Of The Galaxy actor Michael Rooker started posting images on his Instagram account of himself visiting various locations in Georgia, where parts of the movie are being filmed, while wearing a cap emblazoned with the Infinity War logo. Hmm, what could he possibly be doing there?
"That's right, kids, I'm playing two roles in the Guardians/Walking Dead crossover!"
Here's the thing, though: Rooker's character Yondu, the blue guy with the whistle-powered arrow thing, dies at the end of Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2. It's not one of those implied deaths that happens off-screen, either -- he slowly freezes to death before our eyes in deep space while Chris Pratt screams "NO!" at him. The film later shows them holding a funeral and turning his corpse into fireworks. He's definitely dead. And yet Rooker kept posting selfies from the Infinity War makeup trailer, with tape stuck over the logo on his cap that he'd previously "forgotten" to hide.
The obvious implication is that Yondu somehow survived his death and is going to show up to help kick Thanos' ass in Infinity War. However, Guardians director James Gunn threw cold water on that suggestion when he was asked about it and answered bluntly that "Yondu is dead" and will remain like that "so long as I am involved with Marvel."
So why the hell was Rooker on the set of Infinity War? According to Gunn, it was all a misdirection. Before the Guardians sequel hit theaters, fans started noticing that Rooker wasn't on the Infinity War cast list and came close to guessing he was about to kick the bucket, so Marvel had him visit the set and Instagram himself in a branded hat to keep people guessing. Because dreams are meant to be smashed.
