A-listers, Oscar winners, and superheroes: Michael Jackson’s chaotic history of prank calling movie stars
When Michael Jackson passed away on June 25th, 2009, his legions of devoted fans were devastated to lose the ‘King of Pop’. After all, even though his reputation had taken such a battering in the previous decades that he was seen by many as a weirdo at best and a dangerous predator at worst, there were still countless fans who only wanted to remember the good things about their hero. One of those good things – which tended to fly under the radar – was Jackson’s bizarre propensity for prank-calling Hollywood movie stars. Even more bizarrely, they didn’t even need to be stars he’d met before.
In the early 2000s, Russell Crowe was riding high on the crest of a wave that took him to Hollywood’s very top. Between 2000 and 2002, he was nominated for ‘Best Actor’ at the Academy Awards three times in a row. He didn’t pick up the trophies for The Insider and A Beautiful Mind but walked away with the gong for Gladiator – which totally changed his life.
Suddenly, Crowe was catapulted to a level of fame he’d never experienced before. Previously, cinephiles might have known who he was, but he could walk down the street without fear of being mobbed by the general public. Gladiator changed all that, and he hated it. On top of losing his anonymity, though, Crowe’s position in Hollywood meant that he now had to say “no” to people and projects, and this would often crush their hopes and dreams.
Crowe lamented to The Guardian in 2015, “People want a piece of you”.
In a twist of fate that Crowe could never have predicted, though, one of the people who wanted a piece of him was Jackson. The pop icon didn’t want to talk to him about a movie role or invite him to a concert, though. Instead, he simply wanted to prank call the notoriously combustible actor – whom he had never met in his life.
An exasperated Crowe revealed: “I never met him, never shook his hand, but he found out the name I stayed in hotels under”.
This led to two or three years of Crowe, staying in hotel rooms all over the world, fielding calls from Jackson, who would put on a voice and ask things like, “Is Mr Wall there? Is Mrs Wall there? Are there any Walls there? Then what’s holding the roof up?!” Crowe claimed he always knew it was Jackson behind the disguised voices, which made the calls all the more surreal.
He chuckled, “You’re supposed to grow out of doing that, right?”
To Crowe’s chagrin, though, not only did Jackson never grow out of indulging his inner Bart Simpson, but he sometimes had a partner in crime. In 2019, Macaulay Culkin appeared on the Inside of You podcast and revealed that Jackson often roped him into the calls as well. Despite their 22-year age gap, the music idol and Home Alone star were good pals in the ’90s, and Culkin would marvel over the different voices and accents Jackson would put on. They mightn’t have fooled Crowe, but Culkin sure got a kick out of them.
Finally, Jackson’s other favourite target was the Incredible Hulk himself, Lou Ferrigno. In 2021, Ferrigno’s son, Lou Jr, told Page Six that Jackson would drive his partially deaf father to distraction with repeated calls, often asking for someone who didn’t live at the house. Ferrigno would try his best to figure out who the caller was trying to reach, but then it would inevitably dawn on him that it was just Jackson pulling his leg. Lou Jr smiled, “He loved playing pranks; he was so lighthearted and sweet.”
