The crushing irony of Steven Seagal’s biggest on-set irritation
Steven Seagal is not an actor many would credit with a well-developed sense of irony or self-awareness. Indeed, the ponytailed Aikido master has often seemed like he’s been on a one-man mission to piss off everyone he’s ever worked with in Hollywood while never apologising for his behaviour. This is why Seagal’s biggest on-set irritation is so hilariously ironic – and maddening for anyone who ever had the misfortune to cross his path in the last three decades.
In 2015, Seagal, star of nearly 60 of the worst action movies you’ve never heard of, sat down for a quickfire interview with The Guardian. Ostensibly, he was promoting his latest direct-to-video opus, The Mercenary: Absolution. However, as the interviewer clearly hated the film, the chat quickly turned into a series of abrupt questions designed to get Seagal to say something characteristically arrogant and crazy.
For example, when Seagal was asked, “When do you find time for hobbies?” he responded, “I don’t have hobbies. I just hone my skills.” When pushed on whether impressionable audiences may watch his movies and think he’s superhuman, he assured the interviewer, “I don’t know about that. I’m just a simple country boy.” Naturally, this same humble country boy also admitted he only agreed to star in 1996’s Executive Decision – a movie in which his character dies a third of the way through – because the studio paid him a million big ones.
The biggest scoop of the interview, though, came when Seagal was asked about the thing that annoys him most on movie sets. Without a hint of knowing humour, he deadpanned, “Unprofessionalism. That concerns me a great deal.”
One can only assume a series of bloodcurdling screams of anguish were heard throughout Hollywood on the article’s publication day. You see, despite being a man who says he despises unprofessionalism, Seagal has a long, extremely well-documented history of being just about the most unprofessional guy in Hollywood.
In 2021, fellow martial arts star Michael Jai White told VladTV that Seagal doesn’t pull his punches with stuntmen when they work on movies that he directs. In fact, White claimed, “Steven Seagal hits the shit out of people, that’s a unique situation.” White said the stunt performers simply have to grin and bear the punishment because Seagal has full creative control over such DTV efforts. He reasoned, “What are you going to do? You going to complain to the director that the director’s hitting you?”
Seagal’s arrogance has rubbed numerous co-stars the wrong way, including celebrated thesps like Brian Cox. The Succession legend found himself opposite Seagal in The Glimmer Man and later wrote in his memoir, “Steven Seagal is as ludicrous in real life as he appears on screen. He radiates a studied serenity, as though he’s on a higher plane to the rest of us, and while he’s certainly on a different plane, no doubt about that, it’s probably not a higher one.”
Most worryingly, though, Seagal has been allowed to waltz through his career without ever being reined in over his treatment of women. For instance, he has been sued by a litany of female co-workers, dating as far back as 1991 when three Warner Brothers employees accused him of sexual harassment. In 2017, Arrested Development star Portia de Rossi and Knocked Up’s Katherine Heigl both made similar accusations against Seagal. Then, in 2018, Rachel Grant claimed he sexually assaulted her on the set of Out for a Kill – yet it was she who lost her job over it, not him.
To be honest, it sounds like Seagal has slipped over the line from unprofessional to criminal several times, which makes his ludicrous comment about unprofessionalism all the more offensive.
