If you’ve ever been pranked by your friends, you know it’s a good laugh. You get really scared believing someone irreversibly damaged your car, they laugh their heads off and then you feel the sweet relief of finding out it was all only a joke. That’s the scenario the TV show “Punk’D” had in mind. But not everything always went according to plan. As you’ll see in these 5 celebrity pranks that went wrong, whether they were being filmed or not, pranks can be very unpredictable and can take the “prankee” by complete surprise. How would you have reacted if you were in the shoes of these celebrities?
5. Zach Braff Punches a kid on Punk’d
Ashton Kutcher’s MTV show was all about making fun of rich people and taping it all so we can all get a good laugh out of it. They even managed to get Justin Timberlake and Kanye West freak out because of false reasons. But when they set out to prank Zach Braff, no saw this coming. Donald Faison, Braff’s BFF from “Scrubs” and from real life, thought it would be neat to trick his friend into thinking his brand new $100,000 Porsche was destroyed with spray paint. When the two of them got out of a shop and Braff saw the actor kids damaging his precious car, he chased after a twelve year old and started pummeling him. The hidden camera men ran to the kid’s aid. Needless to say, the fighting scene never aired on Punk’d.
4. The set of “Titanic” was slipped PCP
To this day it remains a mystery who was the prankster who had the bright idea to lace the lobster chowder for dinner that night with phencyclidine, also known as PCP or angel dust. More than fifty people on the crew were rushed to the emergency room. Bill Paxton remembers that he originally intended to eat Italian food alone in his trailer but changed his mind and joined the others for chowder. He said that after fifteen minutes of eating, some of the crew were in tears, others were laughing and a few were throwing up. Paxton didn’t experience any of this, but something even worse: he got so paranoid all he wanted to do was breath in a paper bag.
3. Leonardo Dicaprio was tricked into getting ill
It all happened on the set of “Wolf of Wall Street”, where Jonah Hill was waiting for the right moment to prank Dicaprio. His long waiting paid off in the end. Towards the last scenes their two characters are eating sushi when it strikes them that their journey together is about to end. Hill was supposed to have the last morsel of sushi, but he left the honor to Dicaprio, who took that last bite for around seventy times. Apparently, it took Leo that many takes to get the perfect sushi bite on film. By the end, he was feeling so ill after eating so much raw fish, he threw up on Hill’s shoes. No, just kidding, he didn’t do that, but he should’ve.
2. Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross are the Devil
Back in 2009, Andrew Sachs, a British actor, couldn’t participate as a guest on Brand’s radio show. So the latter, together with his co-host, Jonathan Ross, thought to leave some prank calls on Sachs’ voicemail in which they claimed Russel had a love affair with Sachs’ granddaughter, Georgina. The two pranksters didn’t shy away from offering juicy details on their calls. The two presenters’ idea of a joke attracted the wrath of the public. Over 37,500 complaints flooded BBC, while Brand and Ross had to pay a 150,000 pound fine. As to Georgina, she had to suffer the most. Her grandfather still won’t talk to her to this day and she even got disinvited to her grandma’s 80th birthday.
1. Mel Gibson’s pranks
Besides being a renowned actor, Gibson is also known among his fellow coworkers for the pranks he used to pull on set. When he was filming “Forever Young” he showed up at Jamie Lee Curtis’ trailer wearing a hockey mask and pretending to be a murderer with a knife. Gibson sent Helen Hunt a frozen rat as a gift on the set of “What women want”. To illustrate exactly how much of a lunatic he is, here’s what he did to Nancy Meyers. He started a fake report about a madman running around the studio, printing memos and posting them here and there. After panic was somehow induced among the crew members, he dressed as the lunatic and attacked Meyers in her office. She started screaming and even stabbed Gibson with a pencil when she thought she was actually being attacked by a murderer.