Warning: videos contain explicit language
From Tom Cruise’s COVID-19 rant to Reese Witherspoon’s arrest, here are the 9 biggest and worst celebrity meltdowns.
Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise inadvertently became a new kind of folk hero late in 2020 to people who felt that they were the only ones taking coronavirus precautions seriously when a tape emerged of a profanity-laden rant he directed at members of his “Mission: Impossible” crew violating COVID-19 safety precautions on set.
Meanwhile, the majority of the hosts of “The View” agreed with Cruise, while George Clooney added his support as well, though all had reservations about Cruise’s, shall we say, “passion.”
Among those dissenting were five “Mission: Impossible” staffers who reportedly quit following another on-set rant from Cruise.
Christian Bale
Long before Cruise’s rant, Christian Bale’s outburst at cinematographer Shane Hurlbut on the set of “Terminator: Salvation” was the gold-standard of such things.
His sarcastic imitation of Hurlbut, often phonetically rendered as “ah-da-da-dah;” his “oh, goooooood for you;” and the all-time great put-down, “F–k’s sake man, you’re amateur” were all caught on tape.
Bale has profusely apologized, explaining that he was in the midst of a very intense scene at the time, and saying “I was out of order beyond belief. I make no excuses for it.”
Mel Gibson
On the much-less-funny side of things is Mel Gibson’s notorious series of rants. The first inkling that there was more to the leading man came in July 2006 during a DUI stop in Malibu, where he opined to the officer who stopped him that “Jews are responsible for all the wars,” which he chalked up to the alcohol.
He was eventually also caught on tape in July 2010 directing profanity-laden and racist venom at ex Oksana Grigorieva, telling her “You look like a f—ing pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of n—-rs, it will be your fault.”
Then, in 2012, he ranted at screenwriters Randall Wallace and Joe Eszterhas, with a detour to again insult Grigorieva.
Vanilla Ice
Vanilla Ice spent most of the 1990s as a punchline after the stratospheric success of “Ice Ice Baby,” and by 1999, was apparently ready to uncork a lot of that rage on the set of an MTV show called “25 Lame,” which dunked on the channel’s most famously bad videos.
As a guest on the show, Ice was only supposed to smash the tape of “Ice Ice Baby” with a baseball bat he’d been provided with, but went a little too far, totally destroying the show’s entire set. At least it was cathartic for him, even if hosts Janeane Garofalo, Chris Kattan, Dennis Leary and Jon Stewart seem genuinely terrified to be in an enclosed space with him.
Russell Crowe
Russell Crowe was arrested in New York in June 2005 for allegedly chucking a telephone — and then a vase — at Mercer Hotel clerk Nestor Estrada after becoming infuriated he couldn’t get a connection to Australia to speak to his son.
To duck criminal charges and ensure his ability to continue working in the States, Crowe reportedly settled with Estrada for the astronomical sum of $11 million. “The security video is damning and would become public if [the case enters] the courtroom,” the UK’s Daily Mail quoted a source close to Crowe as saying at the time.
Michael Richards
Richards’ reputation as beloved “Seinfeld” weirdo Kramer was severely tarnished in 2006 when he exploded at two black men heckling his set at the famed Laugh Factory comedy club in Los Angeles.
“Fifty years ago, we’d have you upside down with a f–king fork up your ass,” he said before simply resorting to screaming racial slurs and storming offstage. Allegations that he’d done the same thing to two Jewish patrons at a different comedy club compounded the situation, and Richards went underground for a time, telling Jerry Seinfeld in 2012 the incident still bothered him.
Alec Baldwin
Alex Baldwin’s “30 Rock”-assisted renaissance hit a snag in 2007 when a voicemail surfaced of him berating daughter Ireland after she failed to respond to a phone call from him. The pull-quote from the call — Baldwin calling the then-11-year-old Ireland “a rude, thoughtless, little pig” — quickly went viral and cost Baldwin his visitation rights temporarily. Ireland brushed off the incident to Page Six in 2012, saying, “People made it out to be a way bigger deal than it was,” before adding, “He’s said stuff like that before just because he’s frustrated.
“For me it was like, ‘OK, whatever.’ I called him back I was like, ‘Sorry Dad, I didn’t have my phone.’ That was it.”
Reese Witherspoon
Witherspoon and husband Jim Toth were arrested in 2013 after being pulled over, with the star drunkenly pulling the fame card on the arresting officer. “You’re about to find out who I am,” she said, brazenly threatening, “You are going to be on national news.”
“I’m a U.S. citizen and I’m allowed to stand on American ground,” she added, bizarrely, at one point also telling the officer she was pregnant.
“It’s one of those nights, you know, we went out to dinner in Atlanta and we had one too many glasses of wine and we thought we were fine to drive and we absolutely were not,” Witherspoon told “Good Morning America” a week later.
David O. Russell
Before “The Fighter,” “Silver Linings Playbook” and “American Hustle” cemented his reputation as an artful hitmaker, it seemed like director David O. Russell’s reputation may have been dynamited when a tape of him hurling a slur at “I Heart Huckabees” star Lily Tomlin leaked to the press in 2003.
At least Tomlin is in good company: George Clooney got into a physical fight with Russell on the set of “Three Kings,” Page Six reported in 2008 that actor James Caan had walked off the set of a Russell film and Jennifer Lawrence took to Facebook to deny rumors she and Russell got into it on the set of “Joy” in 2015.