Michael Jackson Used To Regularly Prank Call Russell Crowe And The Jokes Were Pure Electricity

The Guardian – 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 f*cking 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?”

Classic Michael Jackson comedy here, the kind of hearty laughs you can only get after settling lawsuits over kids’ repressed memories and stolen butt virginity over a tall glass of Jesus Juice. There have obviously been dozens of incredibly strange things coming out about Michael Jackson over the decades but for some reason this struck me as one of the strangest. Michael Jackson NEVER MET Russell Crowe but found out his road name, called hotels for YEARS just to fuck with him, and then dropped prank calls just for his own amusement that Bart Simpson would commit a ritualistic Japanese suicide over. You fucking made Thriller, Mike. Stop being a weirdo a half-decade after your death.

Also the full Russell Crowe profile is worth an Instapaper read just for absurd tidbits like this, the time he was on Al-Qaeda’s hit list before 9/11:

There was also the then little-known terrorist organisation al-Qaida threatening to kidnap him in 2001. “I still really don’t know to this day what the fuck that was all about. All I know is, I arrived in LA, got to my hotel, as I’d done umpteen times before, started unpacking, and there was a knock at the door and a team of FBI guys wanted to sit down and discuss something with me. And then, for nearly two years, they were always around. I remember going to the Golden Globes and having, like, 16 security guys with me. I don’t even know why. They wouldn’t give me any details. And of course, people were like: ‘Look at him, he thinks he’s fucking Elvis.’ And then one day they just weren’t there any more.”

One can only imagine the mind games Michael Jackson and bin Laden could have come up with together. Pranks and terrorist threats coming together in a beautiful union like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

(h/t Uproxx, Russell Crowe photo by Debby Wong/Shutterstock.com)