We all have buttons that we don't like to have pushed, and celebrities are no different.
For Taylor Swift, it's being asked about dating.
For Tom Cruise, it's pharmaceutical drugs.
Whatever the trigger, these interviewers pushed too far and tensions lit up.
These are the celebs who ripped their interviewer to shreds.
Larry King's 2007 interview with Jerry Seinfeld has gone down in infamy.
Basically, the only way it could have gone worse is if someone dropped a Junior Mint
into an open chest cavity during surgery.
King's big mistake was asking if Seinfeld's long-running, eponymous series had been cancelled.
"You gave it up, right?"
"I did."
"They didn't cancel you?"
As fans of the show have long known, the star chose to end things on a high note and reportedly
turned down a $5 million per episode offer from NBC.
Seinfeld responded to King incredulously:
"You think I got cancelled?
Are you under the impression I got cancelled?"
"Have I hurt you, Jerry?"
Jerry then reminded Larry that the news was clearly available, semi-joking,
"Is this still CNN?"
"Don't most shows go down a little?"
"Most people do also."
He then drove it home with:
"I was the Number 1 show on television, Larry.
Do you know who I am?"
King tried to laugh off his mistake, but it was clear Seinfeld was annoyed.
The talk show host addressed the disastrous exchange years later during an interview on
The Young Turks, remembering,
"He later said he wasn't mad, but he was mad...I thought he was dropped."
Claiming he hadn't kept up with the show in its day, King added,
"When he took it off, I didn't know that he took it off.
But that was, I should have known that, but I was stupid."
Taylor Swift is so obviously sick of having her love life slapped across the tabloids.
In 2013, she told Vanity Fair about her extreme distaste for the way she's portrayed as positively
boy-crazy in the media, saying,
And this is hardly the first time Swifty has said something like this.
So Nancy O'Dell should have probably known better before presuming this scenario, at
the 2015 Grammys.
"You're gonna walk home with more than maybe just a trophy tonight.
I think lots of men"
The Entertainment Tonight reporter received what can only be described as a death stare.
Swift then replied,
"I'm not going to walk home with any men tonight.
I'm going to go hang out with my friends, and then I go home to the cats."
"No men allowed."
"Men get me in trouble."
Burn.
Rashida Jones had an epic quip when a reporter made a major flub, neglecting the fact that
the star is, indeed, biracial.
TNT's Danielle Demski, for some reason, must have forgotten that the Parks & Recreation
star's famous parents are legendary music producer Quincy Jones and the late Golden
Globe-winning actress Peggy Lipton.
The incident occurred at the 2015 SAG awards as Demski commented on Jones' red carpet look.
"You look like you've just come off like an island or something.
You're very tan, very tropical."
"I mean, you know, I'm ethnic."
"Me too."
Rihanna is absolutely no stranger to shutting down an interview if the questions steer towards
tabloid gossip.
The girl is here to work, work, work.
In 2012, RiRi was promoting her upcoming film Battleship when she completely derailed an
interview on the Australian morning show Sunrise.
All thanks to the interviewer asking the singer how she feels about being romantically linked
to other stars.
At the time, this included rumors about a fling with Ashton Kutcher and her ex-boyfriend
Chris Brown who had been charged with assaulting the star in 2009.
"How frustrating is it when you're linked to another Hollywood star?"
"Very frustrating.
Almost as frustrating as being asked about it."
Rihanna then cut off the interview, by telling the interviewer just where she stands on owning
her privacy.
"They're interested in a lot of things, a lot of things that don't matter, or shouldn't."
Cara Delevingne's 2015 interview with Good Day is the visual equivalent of a creepy dude
asking a pretty girl to smile when she's clearly annoyed.
The whole thing was completely uncomfortable, and Delevingne wasn't here for it at all.
Things got off to a pretty bad start when one of the anchors completely botched her
name, calling Cara...Carla.
"Carla Delevigne is in the movie, she joins us live from New York City to talk about Paper
Towns.
Cara, good morning!"
Things went downhill from there, when one interviewer asked the star, who was promoting
her film Paper Towns, if it was easier to focus on work because she's busy.
Delevingne replied,
"No, I don't know where that comes from."
Then, when asked if she had anything in common with her character, she snapped back with
a sarcastic,
"No, I actually hate her."
The interview finally came to a disastrous halt when a host asked her why she didn't
seem more excited.
"I saw you in London talking a couple weeks ago on TV, and you seemed a lot more excited
about it than you do right now.
Are you just exhausted?"
Having clearly mastered Taylor Swift's death stare, Delevingne added,
"You know, the premiere was last night.
It was an emotional night.
It felt like the end of an era, but I'm not any less excited than I was a couple of weeks
ago."
Yet, the hosts kept pushing.
"You do seem a bit irritated.
Perhaps it's just us."
"No, yeah, I think it's just you."
…Well, they did kick things off by calling her "Carla."
Anne Hathaway goes to great lengths to master every role she takes on.
For Les Mis, the star told Vogue that she adopted a diet consisting of quote, "two thin
squares of dried oatmeal paste a day."
She had a similar work ethic while filming The Dark Knight Rises, for which she reportedly
went vegan, learned martial arts, picked up yoga, and weight trained for 10 months.
Yet, all that this one Extra interviewer wanted to talk about was the star's figure and tight
costume.
He asked,
"You're always in great shape, but you had to make sure you were in perfect shape for
this one, didn't you?"
"Eh."
After Hathaway highlighted her stunt work, the interviewer followed up by asking whether
or not her catsuit was "form-fitting," which anyone with eyes could clearly see.
After a third question about her body and diet, Hathaway finally shot back,
"Any particular workout-"
"Are you trying to lose weight?
What's the deal, man?
You look great.
No, no, seriously.
We have to talk about this.
What do you want?
Are you trying to fit into a catsuit?"
How could you not love the way she handled herself in this objectively awkward moment?
One particular 1994 ESPN2 interview with former New Orleans Saints quarterback Jim Everett
makes The Maury Show look tame.
According to The Washington Post, even host Jim Rome later admitted he went too far, but
ESPN never took disciplinary action against him.
Apparently, getting smashed to the ground on live TV is punishment enough though Everett
should have kept his cool.
"Jim, good to have you on the show."
"Good to be here, Jim, thank you."
"Check that, Chris Everett, good to have you on the show."
The issues began when Rome called the NFL star "Chris Everett," an apparent reference
to female tennis legend, Chris Everett, and a jab clearly aimed to be an insult.
This was the first time the host ever uttered the long-running slight right to the quarterback's
face.
Everett said,
"If you call me Chris Everett to my face one more time…"
"I already did it twice."
"You better...you better, you call me one more time you better take a station break."
The final straw was when Everett said,
"You probably won't say it again."
"I bet I do."
"Okay."
"Chris."
Everett ended up flipping the table and shoving Rome to the ground.
Everett later said in a teleconference, via The Washington Post, that he has no regrets,
claiming,
Perhaps The Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg got a little bit too meta in his portrayal
of the infamously smug Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
Honestly, it's hard to tell exactly what he was thinking when he used an entire Univision
interview to roast a younger blogger while promoting his film Now You See Me.
In between railing on interviewer Romina Puga for referring to Morgan Freeman by only his
last name and mocking her for writing interview questions on her hand, Eisenberg's sense of
humor quickly went from sarcastic to straight up caustic.
"Do you know the comedian Carrot Top?"
"Yes, horrible."
"Well, you are like the Carrot Top of interviewers."
"Ooh…"
Although Eisenberg claimed it was a compliment, Puga responded:
"I'm going to go cry now."
"No, don't cry now.
Cry after the interview is over 'cause otherwise, I'll look like I'm responsible for it."
In a now-deleted Tumblr post titled "Jesse Eisenberg isn't very nice," Puga claimed she
was quote, "humiliated" by the star.
In 2005, the universe gifted us with a very sour Tom Cruise.
"I will talk about what I want to talk about, and I won't talk about what I don't want to
talk about."
In an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC's Today Show, we got to see Cruise rattle off his
knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry, and we use the term "knowledge" loosely.
"I've never agreed with psychiatry.
Ever...Psychiatry is, it's a pseudoscience"
Lauer kept talking about people he knew who were helped by medication, including Brooke
Shields, who took antidepressants for postpartum depression, but Cruise kept shutting him down.
"There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance...Matt, you're glib.
You don't even know what Ritalin is."
Put this interview up there in the Tom Cruise Interview Hall of Infamy...right next to that
couch-jump next to Oprah.
It's no secret that the heroines in Quentin Tarantino's flicks are habitually and graphically
abused and injured.
The Daily Beast even dedicated an entire article to highlighting disturbing behavior the filmmaker
allegedly directed towards female actors.
Despite the fact that violence seems to string together all of this films, the director wasn't
so thrilled to be asked about it on KRON 4 News while promoting Kill Bill: Volume 1.
During the interview, Tarantino insisted that 12-year-olds accompanied by their parents,
should see his R-rated film, claiming it's empowering to girls.
The interviewer strongly disagreed, claiming that Kill Bill encouraged real-life violence,
and asking,
"Why the need for so much gruesome, graphic violence?
Why not let us imagine a little of it?"
"Because it's so much fun, Jan.
Get it!"
The director then added,
"Ah, but you see Jan, you're all messed up because you're talking about real-life, and
I'm talking about the movies."
Tarantino then yelled about how kids should be able to tell the difference between fake
and real violence.
But in a New York Times interview, actress Uma Thurman claimed the director quote, "persuaded"
her to do a stunt in a car that she felt was too dangerous.
She ended up crashing and permanently injuring her neck.
Robert Downey Jr. wanted absolutely nothing to do with the personal questions asked by
Krishnan Guru-Murthy during the press rounds for Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Nonetheless, the interviewer decided to do a deep dive.
"I don't know how comfortable you, you know, are talking about yourself."
As soon as the interviewer brought up the actor's father and his past relationship with
alcohol and drugs, Downey Jr. flew out of there faster than Iron Man.
"I really don't, what are we doing?"
"Well, I'm just asking questions, that's all."
"Right.
Bye."
In an interview with Howard Stern, Downey Jr. admitted he wished he'd left the interview
even sooner, saying,
"This has nothing to do with your creepy, dark agenda that I'm feeling, all of a sudden,
like, ashamed and obligated to accommodate your weirdo s---...What I have to do in the
future is give myself permission to say, 'That is more than likely a syphilitic parasite
and I need to distance myself from this clown.'"
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