Michael Jackson may have been the most famous entertainer on the planet, but to Russell Crowe, he was something else entirely: a persistent prank caller with a weakness for dad jokes.
One of Jackson’s lesser-known quirks was his love of prank-calling Hollywood stars, and he did not always bother meeting them first. The “Gladiator” star revealed the strange saga in a March 2015 interview with The Guardian while promoting his directorial debut, “The Water Diviner.” According to Crowe, the King of Pop hunted down the alias he used at hotels and dialed him up relentlessly, even though the two superstars never met.
Michael Jackson’s Signature Prank Was Pure Schoolyard
“For two or three [expletive] years, I never met him, never shook his hand, but he found out the name I stayed in hotels under, so it didn’t matter where I was, he’d ring up, do this kind of thing, like you did when you were 10, you know,” Crowe said.
The singer’s sense of humor, it turns out, never left elementary school. His favorite routine was a knock-knock-adjacent classic. “‘Is Mr Wall there? Is Mrs Wall there? Are there any Walls there? Then what’s holding the roof up? Ha ha,'” Crowe recalled, adding, “You’re supposed to grow out of doing that, right?”
Russell Crowe Could Not Escape the Calls
The Oscar-winning actor told the story again on “The Graham Norton Show” that same year, explaining that no hotel was safe. “He just got into the habit of wherever I was staying, [Michael] would just call into the hotel, ask for my room and put on funny voices,” he said.
“I’d never met him! The first couple people I said it to, I didn’t want to sound like I was insane… When I actually started talking to people who really knew him well, they’d go, ‘Man, he does it all the time.'”
Jackson committed to every performance, too. He “would always start off being kind of gruff, like he was the hotel management and there was some kind of problem,” Crowe shared. And when the actor’s patience wore thin, the singer would drop the act, chuckle and reveal, “Don’t worry Russell, it’s only Michael!”
When a stunned Graham Norton asked if the two ever met face to face, Crowe’s answer said it all: “Never.”
The Prank Calls Started Long Before Crowe Went Public
GettyThe 2015 retellings were not the first hint of Jackson’s phone habit. Crowe shared with The Sun in 2013 (as reported by Fox News), describing the singer’s fake-emergency bit.
“He’d ring me and in a strong voice and say, ‘There is an emergency, and you need to leave the building,'” Crowe told The Sun, as per CBS News. “I’d ask, ‘Who is this?’ And he’d say, ‘Do not worry, Russell, just kidding, this is Michael.'”
Russell Crowe Was Not Michael Jackson’s Only Prank Victim
Some of Jackson’s targets were actual friends. Macaulay Culkin revealed on a 2019 episode of the “Inside of You” podcast that Jackson often pulled him into the calls too, marveling at the different voices and accents the singer put on. Crowe may not have been fooled, but Culkin got a kick out of every one.
Culkin opened up about the origins of the friendship, tracing it back to the whirlwind that followed “Home Alone” in 1990.
“He reached out to me because a lot of things were happening, big and fast with me. I think he identified with that,” Culkin said, as reported by People.
“I was a peerless person. Nobody else in my Catholic school had even this much idea of what I was going through, and he was the kind of person who’d been through the exact same frickin’ thing and wanted to make sure I wasn’t alone in that.”
Overnight stardom had cut the child actor off from kids his own age, and Jackson recognized the loneliness instantly, having lived it himself decades earlier. The way Culkin tells it, the singer stepped in as a protector when almost no one else could.
That closeness never faded. Culkin went on to become godfather to Jackson’s three kids and even has a matching tattoo with Paris Jackson.
Then there was the Incredible Hulk himself.
In 2021, Lou Ferrigno‘s son, Lou Jr., told Page Six that Jackson loved dialing up his partially deaf father and asking for someone who did not live at the house. Ferrigno would scramble to figure out who the caller wanted before realizing, yet again, that it was just Jackson messing with him.
“He loved playing pranks; he was so lighthearted and sweet,” Lou Jr. said.
