1.
Dennis Rodman is friends with Kim Jong Un, going so far as to say they’re “friends for life.” He’s visited North Korea many times, and with Kim, he said the two “ride horses, we hang out, we go skiing, we hardly ever talk politics, and that’s the good thing.” The former NBA player even offered to “straighten things out” between the leader of North Korea and then-President Donald Trump, who he also said was a friend.
2.
In another bizarre Dennis Rodman fact, he’s broken his penis while having sex on three separate occasions.
3.
Former US Senator Ron Paul used to be an OB-GYN, and he delivered Selena Quintanilla. Selena’s mother also didn’t know she was pregnant — she went to the hospital because she wasn’t feeling well and was initially told she had a tumor that had to be removed, according to Selena’s father. Seeking a second opinion, she met Ron Paul, who told her she was pregnant and later delivered her child. So, without Ron Paul, Selena may never have been born.
4.
Speaking of politicians, Ronald Reagan indirectly saved his own life when he appeared as a Secret Service agent years before he ever became president in the film Code of the Secret Service. Nine-year-old Jerry Parr saw the film and was inspired to go into the Secret Service himself. Decades later, he was with Reagan during the assassination attempt against him — and helped save his life.
5.
Back in 2005, Olivia Newton John’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Patrick McDermott, disappeared while on a fishing trip. They had been together for about nine years, but their relationship was rocky, and they’d broken up multiple times. In June that year, McDermott set out on an overnight boating trip with 22 others. By morning, he was gone, with his wallet and other personal items left behind. The Coast Guard concluded he had probably drowned.
Here’s where the story gets weird — McDermott might actually still be alive today. There have been multiple reports of sightings over the years, and Dateline even claimed he faked his own death to avoid his debts. However, there is no solid proof of this, and his ex-wife, Yvette Nipar — who shared a son with McDermott — does not believe any of the theories.
6.
Osama bin Laden was a major Whitney Houston fan, according to Kola Boof, who claims to have lived with Bin Laden for a few months. “He said that he had a paramount desire for Whitney Houston, and although he claimed music was evil, he spoke of someday spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting with the superstar,” she said. She even claimed Bin Laden planned to kill Bobby Brown, whom she was married to at the time.
7.
As a kid, Terrance Howard witnessed his dad stab a man to death while they were in line to take photos with a department store Santa, in what became known as the “Santa Line Slaying.” Terrance said the man, who was also there with his family, made a racist comment to Terrance’s father, Tyrone, after he thought he skipped in line. Tyrone was arrested and pleaded self-defense; he ended up being convicted of manslaughter and spent eleven months in prison.
8.
Speaking of Howard — he’s made his life’s mission to prove that 1×1=2 instead of 1. An interview with Rolling Stones states, “He began writing down his logic, in a language of his own devising that he calls Terryology. He wrote forward and backward, with both his right and left hands, sometimes using symbols he made up that look foreign, if not alien, to keep his ideas secret until they could be patented.” He and his then-wife, Miranda Pak, began buying scissors, wire, magnets, and sheets of plastic, then spending up to 17 hours a day cutting out and joining the plastic in ways that were meant to prove his various mathematical theories.
9.
Leighton Meester made headlines when it was reported that she had been born in jail as her mother was serving a sentence for helping smuggle 1,200 pounds of weed out of Jamaica. Meester later clarified her mother gave birth in a hospital before returning to prison — with Meester spending three months in a halfway house. Meester’s aunt, who had been arrested with her mother, actually escaped prison and became the first woman on the US Marshals 15 Most Wanted List in the US: “My family has a crazy history. Probably the craziest I’ve ever heard of,” Meester admitted in 2012.
10.
When Angelina Jolie was 22, she hired a hitman to kill her. She was suicidal, but she was worried that the people in her life would blame themselves if she died by suicide. She found a hitman in New York — which she said wasn’t difficult — but he ended up talking her out of it. “He was a decent enough person and asked if I could think about it and call him again in two months. Something changed in my life, and I figured I’d stick it out.”
11.
Travis Barker, similarly, tried to pay friends one million dollars to kill him after suffering a traumatizing plane crash in 2008. The Blink-182 drummer said, “I would call friends of mine and go, ‘I’ll deposit a million dollars into whoever’s bank account,'” to take him out.
12.
The plane crash itself is a wild story. Before the crash, Barker’s then-wife decided to stay home at the last minute “in case something happens.” Their daughter also hysterically begged him not to go, telling him the roof was going to come off. Barker himself had a bad feeling about the flight but got onto it anyway. The plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing both pilots, Barker’s assistant, and his security guard. Barker and his friend DJ AM escaped the crash, but Barker jumped into jet fuel in his hurry, causing him to catch fire. He spent 11 weeks in the hospital and almost lost one of his feet.
13.
Another celebrity who was in a plane crash was Sandra Bullock. The plane skidded off the runway, severely damaging the plane but luckily leaving Bullock unhurt. Coincidentally, Bullock had recently starred in the film Forces of Nature, which is about a plane that skids off the runway.
14.
In a much odder example, Paula Abdul has made multiple remarks about being in a plane crash in the ’90s, suffering injuries that led to her retreating from the spotlight for some time. There’s just one problem: there is no record of the crash ever happening. Abdul’s description doesn’t match any crashes at the time, though it is possible it was not reported and the wreckage was not found. Still, as this Jezebell article points out, this would mean Abdul and the other passengers just left the burned-out plane in a field and never reported it.
15.
Julia Roberts, who would later star in Runaway Bride, really was a runaway bride. In 1991, days before she was going to marry Kiefer Sutherland, Roberts called off her wedding. On the day she was supposed to be married, she instead went on a date with Jason Patric, who was friends with Sutherland (but had recently been uninvited from the wedding), then ran away with him to Ireland.
16.
Speaking of Roberts…Martin Luther King Jr. paid the hospital bill when Julia Roberts was born. Why? Roberts’ parents ran a theater school that let in the Kings’ children at a time when few programs would admit Black children. When her parents couldn’t pay the hospital bill, Martin and Coretta stepped in.
17.
And speaking of MLK Jr., Samuel L. Jackson once held his father, Martin Luther King Sr., hostage. Jackson was part of a group protest against the administration and curriculum, which involved locking the school’s board (which included Dr. King) in a room using chains from the walkways for a day and a half. At one point, Dr. King had chest pains, so they “put him on a ladder, put him out the window, and sent him down.” Jackson ended up being kicked out of school for the protest.
18.
Fran Drescher claimed that when she was younger, she was abducted by aliens who put a chip in her head — and that the same thing had happened to her ex-husband, Peter Marc Jacobson. “You know, it’s funny because Peter and I both saw [aliens] before we knew each other, doing the same thing, driving on the road with our dads,” she recounted. “We were both in junior high. A few years later, we met, and we realized that we had the same experience. I think that somehow we were programmed to meet.” She continued that they both have scars in the same spot, where the chips are, though “the aliens programmed [them] to think” the scars were from something else.
19.
In his book, Van Halen member Sammy Hagar wrote that he had an alien abduction experience, too. He told MTV, “Aliens were plugged into me. It was a download situation. This was long before computers or any kind of wireless. There weren’t even wireless telephones. Looking back now, it was like, ‘F***, they downloaded something into me!’ Or they uploaded something from my brain, like an experiment — ‘See what this guy knows.'”
20.
Barbara Streisand cloned her dog Samantha after she died using cells from her mouth and stomach — TWICE. She has to dress the dogs in different colors to tell them apart.
21.
Diane von Furstenberg and her husband Barry Diller also cloned their dog to create twin Jack Russel Terriers — which cost over $100,000.
22.
Guillermo del Toro’s father was kidnapped for 72 days in 1997, with a $1 million ransom…which was initially reported to have been paid by director James Cameron, a friend of del Toro. Del Toro later clarified that he had paid the ransom, but Cameron had offered and then “came in and took charge” of the situation, paying for the services of a hostage negotiator.
23.
Benedict Cumberbatch was also once kidnapped in South Africa. He was driving with friends back to the set of To the Ends of the Earth when their tire blew out. Armed men asked them for money and their drugs (they were smoking weed) and then tied them up and put them in their car, later putting Cumberbatch in the trunk before tossing him on the ground in the middle of nowhere and letting them all go.
24.
British singer Duffy was also kidnapped for four weeks and even taken to another country. The event deeply traumatized her and is the main reason she’s retreated from the public eye.
25.
Jack Nicholson was raised by his grandmother, who he believed to be his mother — it turns out that the much older “sister” he’d had was his real mother. His mother was only 18 when she had him, as a result of a relationship with a married man. To avoid scandal, Nicholson’s grandmother claimed him as her own.
He didn’t find out the truth until after his mother died when Time magazine did a profile on him in 1974 (directly before the release of his film Chinatown) and discovered the truth in their research. The most eerie part? Nicholson’s character finds out the truth about another character — namely, that her “sister” is actually her daughter — in Chinatown.
26.
Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman made waves when he married 18-year-old Mandy Smith, whom he had been dating since she was 13. Wyman was in his fifties. But the scandal didn’t end there — Wyman’s son Stephen ended up marrying Mandy’s mother. The two were closer in age than Wyman and Mandy. As this Grunge article points out, if Bill and Mandy had still been together when the second Wyman and Smith got married, Stephen would’ve been his own step-grandfather.
27.
Sean Penn was once in jail with the infamous Night Stalker serial killer. In fact, the murderer, Richard Ramirez, essentially sent Penn fan mail asking for an autograph. Penn, who was spending 60 days in jail at the time for reckless driving and punching an extra — said Ramirez wrote, “Hey, Sean, stay tough and hit them again — Richard Ramirez, 666.” Penn replied with a note saying he felt “absolutely no kinship” with Ramirez, despite both being inmates and said, “I hope gas descends upon you before sanity does, you know? It would be a kinder way out.”
28.
Another celebrity connected to a murderer is Woody Harrelson, who is the son of hitman Charles Harrelson, who murdered Judge John Howland Wood in 1979. This fact would become much stranger in light of Harrelson’s starring in No Country for Old Men. Though the film did not include it, the No Country for Old Men novel featured the line, “Here a while back in San Antonio they shot and killed a federal judge,” which was likely referring to the murder perpetrated by Woody’s father.
29.
Oh, and Matthew McConaughey might also be Charles Harrelson’s son, meaning Woody and Matthew might be half-brothers. According to McConaughey’s mother, she “knew” Charles Harrelson and “frequented the same similar place out in West Texas one time when he was on furlough.” While the two haven’t taken a DNA test due to resistance on McConaughey’s part to discover that who he thought was his father may not actually be his biological father, the possibility has been discussed. This is especially ironic given that Harrelson and McConaughey are close friends, and their children already call the other “Uncle.”
30.
Jack Black’s mother is engineer Judith Love Cohen, who helped create the system that rescued the Apollo 13 crew. In fact, according to a tribute one of her other sons wrote after her death, “She actually went to her office on the day that Jack was born. When it was time to go to the hospital, she took with her a computer printout of the problem she was working on. Later that day, she called her boss and told him that she had solved the problem. And…oh, yes, the baby was born, too.”
31.
Sean Astin has literally lived the plot of Mamma Mia! After his mother had a series of short-lived relationships and affairs resulting in a pregnancy, his father could have been one of three men — Michael Tell, Desi Arnaz, Jr., or John Astin. He has a relationship with all three, though a paternity test eventually proved Tell was his biological father.
32.
Lord of the Rings star Christopher Lee had one of the wildest lives I have ever heard of. First, he was the only LOTR cast member to have met Tolkien. He also witnessed the last public execution by guillotine. He fought in World War II and was a Nazi hunter, and he also saw concentration camps.
At one point, he was reportedly a spy, and fans have theorized that his cousin, Ian Fleming, wrote the Bond books at least partially based on him.
33.
A body double was used for Willem Dafoe’s nude scenes in Antichrist because, according to Dafoe, if they had used his genitals, “that’s all that people would talk about.” Indeed, it did become all people talked about — especially after director Lars von Trier claimed that Dafoe “has an enormous dick” and that “we had to [have a stand-in dick] because Will’s was too big” and “everybody got very confused when they saw it.”
35.
And Gemma Arterton was born with six fingers on each hand. She had them removed as a child. So did Taye Diggs.
Here are Ashton’s, where you can see what we mean by “webbed middle toes.”
37.
And finally…Mick Jagger has a son who is younger than his great-grandchild. In 2016, his then-29-year-old girlfriend Melanie Hamrick gave birth to their son Deveraux — two years after his great-grandson Ezra was born. Ezra was born to Jagger’s granddaughter from his marriage with Bianca Jagger in the ’70s.
What wild celeb fact keeps you up at night? Let us know in the comments.
