Hell hath no fury like a celebrity scorned — and these bad-tempered
stars have spent their entire lives proving it.
Alec Baldwin has been no stranger to controversy in recent years — in between all those provocative
political sketches and on-set tragedies, however, you might have forgotten that he's
also got a heck of a temper. In 2007, Baldwin famously called his then 11-year-old daughter,
Ireland Baldwin, a "rude, thoughtless little pig" in a leaked voicemail message. He later
apologized on "The View." It seems like they patched things up, though.
"By the way, Mission: Impossible is what I call getting my dad to apologize."
Ireland later came to her father's defense when he was suspended from
MSNBC for hurling a homophobic slur at a photographer. She wrote on Twitter:
"For someone who has battled with anger management issues,
my dad has grown tremendously. Sometimes we let our tempers get the best of us.
Tempers are like wildfires. Something or someone can easily fuel the fire."
If you mess with a Baldwin, consider yourself burned.
There are few celebs as outspoken as Azealia Banks. She has engaged in public rows with a
number of other A-listers, and she's not afraid of a good Twitter rant,
either. She was also quick to call out Russell Crowe for allegedly spitting on her,
choking her and calling her a racial slur; rapper RZA, who was present during the alleged assault,
verified her claim about the spitting but claimed that Banks was the one who tried to get physical.
Things came to a head for the star in 2017, when she agreed to take anger management classes after
allegedly punching and biting a nightclub security guard. According to media reports at the time,
her charge would "be reduced to disorderly conduct" if she completed the 26-week program.
Banks does have a way to help deal with her terrible temper, however. She told Broadly
that she actively practices witchcraft — and her favorite spell, "the egg spell,"
helps dispel negativity. Based on her past, she must be blowing through a whole lot of eggs.
Steven Seagal, faded action hero and BFF of Vladimir Putin, has beaten the spit out of
countless make-believe bad guys onscreen. Seagal wasn't averse to using those martial arts skills
against fellow actor John Leguizamo while they worked together on 1996's Executive Decision.
Leguizamo later told The A.V. Club that, on the first day of rehearsal, Seagal walked in and said:
"I'm in command. What I say is law."
Leguizamo responded by laughing out loud, prompting Seagal to smash the stunned actor
into a brick wall, so forcefully that he fell to the floor, gasping for air. Leguizamo remembered:
"He can fight. That's the only downside to my comment: He can actually knock me out."
Seagal's volatile temper also became apparent in 2018, when he sat down for a satellite interview
with BBC's Kirsty Wark. As the interview was winding down, Wark asked how he was dealing
with the multiple claims of sexual harassment that had been made against him. And then this happened:
"Hello, Steven Seagal?"
"Steven Seagal there."
Maybe it's only right that Jack Nicholson once starred in a movie called Anger Management,
considering he's got quite the temper himself. He once told The Sun that,
as a young man, he blew up at a customer while working as a short-order cook in
his native New Jersey. He recalled that, after receiving a complaint:
"I lost my temper, hit the pancake and said, 'Make your own damn pancakes!'"
The passage of time apparently failed to mellow Nicholson. In 1994,
the 56-year-old actor was driving in Los Angeles when another car cut him off. When their vehicles
stopped at a red light, Nicholson got out, pulled a golf club from the trunk,
and bashed in the roof and windshield of the motorist's Mercedes. Nicholson was charged
with misdemeanor vandalism and assault. The other driver sued and the case was settled out of court,
reportedly costing Nicholson a hefty $500,000. In a later interview with Golf Digest, he confessed:
"I was out of my mind. I was on my way to the course,
and in the midst of this madness I somehow knew what I was doing, because I reached into
my trunk and specifically selected a club I never used on the course: my two-iron."
Jack Nicholson isn't the only Hollywood legend to experience road rage. In 2001,
Gene Hackman was driving along Sunset Boulevard when another car cut him off,
causing Hackman to rear-end the vehicle. Two men exited the other vehicle and angrily exchanged
words with Hackman. At some point, a fight broke out; Hackman reportedly got in a few good punches
before one of the men stopped him cold with a kick to the crotch. Despite the fisticuffs,
no charges were filed. Hackman's spokesperson told Entertainment Weekly:
"Gene thought it was funny, really. He's not a soft guy, he's an ex-Marine and he
can take care of himself. Really, he's a very gentle guy, but anybody can be provoked."
For Hollywood insiders, news of Hackman's violent temper was hardly news at all.
Hackman has had a long history of fiery battles with his directors,
eruptions that happened so frequently he came to be nicknamed "Vesuvius."
Bill O'Reilly was Fox News' most prominent on-air personality right up until 2017,
when he was shown the door after a spate of sexual harassment allegations. Another
less-than-charming aspect of O'Reilly's personality is his explosive temper,
hilariously captured on video while he attempted to shoot a show-ending farewell
on Inside Edition back in the 1990s. Reading from the teleprompter, O'Reilly's inability
to grasp how a video from Sting could "play us out" of the show led him to erupt in fury.
"We'll do it live! F–k it! We'll do it live! I'll write it and we'll do it live!"
According to Theresa McKeown, who worked for Inside Edition at the time,
O'Reilly's behavior wasn't out of character. She told HuffPost:
"He was definitely hot-tempered and he was
impatient, so when I was going to be dealing with him, I was so afraid."
Meanwhile, allegations of domestic violence emerged during O'Reilly's bitter divorce, with
his daughter testifying that she'd witnessed her dad choking her mother before dragging her down
a flight of stairs. O'Reilly denied his daughter's claims, declaring her testimony to be "100 percent
false." O'Reilly's temper is apparently still an issue, too. In 2022, video footage emerged showing
him threatening a JetBlue employee with physical violence after suffering a delayed flight.
Lily Tomlin isn't usually the type of star associated with temperamental outbursts — or
at least she wasn't, until she worked with director David O. Russell on the 2004 indie
comedy I Heart Huckabees. Leaked footage from the set emerged indicating that Russell really knew
how to push Tomlin's buttons, eventually leading her to unleash a string of profanity at him.
Another leaked clip, during filming of a different scene, demonstrated that the
animosity between actor and director wasn't a one-time thing. The anger also seemed to run
both ways. In the footage, Russell is apparently so exasperated by her questions that he storms
over to the desk at which she is seated and furiously brushes aside a stack of papers,
then calls Tomlin a very rude word beginning with the letter C.
Despite video evidence to the contrary, Tomlin later insisted to The Hollywood
Reporter that their spat "wasn't any big deal." She and Russell,
she explained, made up "in just a few hours." Addressing the incident more
than a decade later during an interview with Vanity Fair, Tomlin shrugged it off.
"It didn't bother me that much. Things happen on the set, you know."
Comedian Katt Williams has a well-earned reputation as a hothead, and 2012 was a
banner year in that regard. His greatest hits included slapping a Target employee in the face,
being arrested for allegedly beating up a guy outside an Oakland hotel,
and fighting with audience members during his own comedy performance.
After a 2014 arrest over an incident in which he and the rap producer Suge Knight took a camera
from a photographer in Beverly Hills, Williams was sentenced to attend anger-management classes
for an entire year. He clearly wasn't paying attention during class, however.
In 2016, Williams was arrested for allegedly physically attacking a woman and then pulling
a gun on her after she told him she thought he wasn't as funny as Kevin Hart. He was then
arrested and charged with battery after allegedly punching out an employee at
a pool supply store. He was also arrested for allegedly assaulting one of his own bodyguards,
and then he was captured on video at a Beanie Sigel concert taking a swing at a
member of the rapper's entourage. And this all happened in the space of a few weeks.
Mel Gibson was one of Hollywood's hottest stars when, in 2006, he unleashed a rage-filled,
profanity-laden, anti-Semitic rant during a DUI arrest. He later confessed to CBS:
"I've been angry all my life."
"You really are crazy."
He wasn't exaggerating. Gibson's anger was on full display in a recording leaked in 2010, in which he
can be heard arguing with then-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva and using a flurry of racist slurs.
The following year, Gibson received three years' probation after pleading no contest to charges
of domestic violence when Grigorieva claimed he struck her, breaking her tooth. Meanwhile,
more recordings emerged, each more unhinged than the last. In 2012, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas
released his recording of Gibson screaming obscenities about an overdue script. Yet
another taped exchange between Grigorieva and Gibson found the star threatening to kill her.
In 2016, Gibson unrepentantly looked back at his 2006 arrest. Insisting that the real
problem wasn't what he said, but that it had been leaked to the press, he told Variety:
"So, not fair."
You might think that having a hair-trigger temper comes as something of a benefit when
you're an MMA fighter. That's certainly been the case for Irish UFC champion Conor McGregor,
the first man in the sport's history to hold simultaneous titles in two distinct
weight classes. His nickname — "Notorious" — is apt, not just for his skill in the Octagon,
but also for his propensity kicking off when he's not on the job.
McGregor has lost his cool in public on multiple occasions, ranging from attacking a referee after
a victory to punching out a guy in a Dublin pub for declining his offer of a shot of his Proper
Twelve whiskey. McGregor subsequently commemorated the latter incident by buying the pub.
McGregor's most infamous incident, however, took place in 2018, at a UFC media event held
at Brooklyn's Barclays Center. Having just been stripped of his title, the ticked-off fighter
made an uninvited and unexpected appearance. McGregor spotted a bus containing several
fighters and proceeded to viciously attack the vehicle by using a metal barricade as a weapon.
Three fighters sustained injuries; McGregor was arrested and charged with an array of offenses,
including criminal mischief and assault. Although he avoided jail time, he was
sentenced to five days of community service, in addition to attending anger-management classes.
These days, John McEnroe is something of an elder statesman of tennis. However,
longtime fans of the sport will certainly remember that, during his prime, McEnroe was prone to
outrageous temper tantrums on the court. Dubbed the bad boy of tennis, McEnroe's angry outbursts
became legendary — but none more so than his epic meltdown while competing at Wimbledon
in 1981. When an umpire ruled that his serve was out of bounds, McEnroe initially seemed confused,
walking toward the official and then blurting out what came to be his signature catchphrase:
"You cannot be serious, man. You cannot be serious!"
According to McEnroe, he has worked hard at taming his temper over the years. As he
explained during an interview on In Depth with Graham Bensinger, anger had become an addiction
for him, which he compared to a smoker's craving for nicotine. At a certain point,
McEnroe felt it was time to kick that habit, and underwent anger-management
counseling — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes when it had been ordered by a court.
"For me personally, I think overall it's helped."
Those efforts appear to have paid off. In 2022, he told the Los Angeles Times:
"I feel like I'm in a pretty good place now."