Social media has made it much easier for us to learn about our favorite celebrities and how they like to spend their time away from the spotlight. But no matter how many cookie recipes and photos from their vacations they share, their lives are often still shrouded in mystery. So if you’re interested in learning some fun facts about your favorite celebrities, we’ve got you covered!
We took a trip to the Today I Learned subreddit and gathered all of the juiciest facts we could find about famous people that you probably haven't heard before. So enjoy reading through your daily dose of celebrity gossip, and be sure to upvote the fun facts that make you love these stars even more!
#1
Singer Dionne Warwick, upset with misogyny in rap lyrics, once set up a meeting with Snoop Dogg and Suge Knight at her home, where she demanded that they call her a “b**ch” to her face. Snoop Dogg later said “I believe we got out-gangstered that day.”
Image credits: rugrats1989
#2
Keanu Reeves runs a private charitable foundation to fund cancer research and children’s hospitals. In 2009, he told Ladies Home Journal: "I don’t like to attach my name to it, I just let the foundation do what it does."
Image credits: LanterneRougeOG
#3
Carrie Fisher delivered a cow tongue inside a Tiffany box to a predatory producer who had assaulted her friend. She said, "The next delivery will be something of yours in a much smaller box!"
Image credits: gmcl86
#4
When Mr Rogers heard his limo driver was going to be waiting outside while Rogers was in a meeting, he asked the driver to come in. On the way back they passed the driver's home and Rogers asked if they could stop and meet his family. Rogers kept in touch with the driver for the rest of his life.
Image credits: szekeres81
#5
While Sharon was giving up, sick in bed with cancer, Ozzy asked Robin Williams to visit her. He hopped in her sick bed randomly and apparently her family went from crying to peeing themselves laughing in a second. She loved it and went from giving up to chemo the next day.
Image credits: WolfeTheMind
#6
After being scolded by a woman who felt that his shoes were too expensive for kids, Shaq forwent a $40 million deal with Reebok & signed one with Walmart. He then brought in designers from Reebok so that his Walmart shoes would look costlier than the $20 price. Over 400 million pairs were sold.
Image credits: suzukigun4life
#7
Gordon Ramsay set up a business inside a London prison that taught inmates how to bake and sold the goods on the outside. Providing the prison with financial support while giving the inmates work experience they could use to find honest work after their sentence.
Image credits: SpiritualHawk420
#8
There was a rumor that Stephen Hawking would deliberately run over the toes of people he didn’t like. He denied this rumor by stating it was “A Malicious rumor” and “I’ll run over anyone who repeats it”.
Image credits: RoundToZero
#9
Prince William and Prince Harry pulled a prank on their grandmother the Queen, by changing her voicemail answering message to say, "Hey wassup! This is Liz. Sorry I'm away from the throne. For a hotline to Philip, press one. For Charles, press two. And for the corgis, press three."
Image credits: EvilGlitter
#10
Laurence Tureaud named himself professionally as Mr. T because he hated how his father, uncle, and brother who returned from Vietnam, were disrespectfully called "boy" by whites. He wanted the first word from everybody's mouth to be "Mister" when speaking to him.
Image credits: tmntnyc
#11
Kate Winslet keeps her Oscar in the bathroom so her guests can hold it and make acceptance speeches in the mirror without feeling self-conscious.
Image credits: DylaramaGladney
#12
Eminem watched his daughter, Hailie, get crowned homecoming queen from an empty classroom in the school because he didn't want to take the attention away from her.
#13
During an interview with Stephen Hawking, the camera operator yanked a cable causing an alarm and Hawking to slump forward. Worried they had k*lled him, everyone rushed over to find Hawking giggling at his own joke. The alarm was from an office computer losing power.
Image credits: Helpful__Alfalfa
#14
Dave Grohl wrote and recorded an entire album by himself, singing and playing each instrument in the studio. He chose the name Foo Fighters to hide his identity. After a record label picked it up he needed to recruit members to perform the songs live. Thus the Foo Fighters were created.
Image credits: jws3233
#15
Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't allowed to dub his own role in Terminator in German, as his accent is considered very rural by German/Austrian standards and it would be too ridiculous to have a death machine from the future come back in time and sound like a hillbilly.
Image credits: [deleted]
#16
Actor Robert Pattinson dealt with an obsessed fan who had been camping outside his apartment by taking her out on a dinner date. "I just complained about everything in my life and she never came back."
Image credits: Eric__Fapton
#17
Keanu Reeves often foregoes some of his paycheck so that producers can bring on other notable actors. On The Devil's Advocate, he reduced his salary by a few million dollars so that they could afford Al Pacino, and he did the same thing on The Replacements to be able to work with Gene Hackman.
Image credits: LanterneRougeOG
#18
Billy Joel never sells front row seats in order to see the real fans right in front of him. He gives them away to random people in the cheap seats so that front row isn't always just wealthy people.
Image credits: YoullNeverWargAlone
#19
In 2013, Saturday Night Live cast member Kenan Thompson refused to play any more black women on the show and demanded SNL hire black women instead.
#20
George Miller had his wife Margaret Sixel edit Mad Max: Fury Road. Miller said that she had never cut an action movie before, and he said if was edited by "the usual kind of guys, it would look like every other action movie we see." She went on to win a Oscar for her editing work in the film.
Image credits: ChaseChaserChased
#21
Carrie Fisher told her fans: "No matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.”
Image credits: LilBadApple
#22
After studios refused, Monty Python and the Holy Grail was instead financed by the rock stars Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Jethro Tull and Elton John who all saw it as simply 'a good tax write-off".
#23
Even though he received surgery to correct his nearsightedness, Horace Grant continued to wear his trademark goggles on the court during his NBA career after hearing from parents that he was a inspiration to children who wore glasses.
Image credits: [deleted]
#24
A fan drove three hours to deliver rapper, Boozie Badazz, a much needed dosage of insulin. She refused to accept payment and instead asked for just a photo. On her way home she stopped at a store, bought a scratch off ticket, and won $10,000.
Image credits: RarelyAquatic
#25
Harper Lee’s friends gave her a full year’s salary for Christmas in 1956 so that she’d be able to take a year off from work to write. Lee used that time to write “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which has since sold over 30 million copies.
Image credits: [deleted]
#26
Donnie Yen (the blind monk in Star Wars: Rogue One/star of the Ip Man films) was once leaving a Hong Kong nightclub with his girlfriend when they were attacked by a gang who had been bothering them earlier in the night. Donnie hospitalised 8 of them.
#27
Comedian Ryan Stiles from Whose Line is it Anyway? has been a frequent fund raiser for children with burn injuries, raising over $500,000 for the Burned Children Recovery Center since 2009, helping the foundation to recover from the economy crash of 2008.
#28
Nirvana played a concert in Beunos Aires where the crowd threw mud and trash at the all-girl opening act. Kurt Cobain was so upset that he sabotaged the show by playing mostly lesser known songs and teasing 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' without ever playing it.
#29
Stan Lee, co-creator of Daredevil, worried that blind people would be offended at how far he exaggerated the way a blind person's other senses are enhanced, until he started receiving letters telling him that blind people greatly enjoyed having Daredevil comics read to them.
#30
When Queen Elizabeth visited the set of "Game of Thrones" she refused to sit on the Iron Throne because there is a law disallowing her from sitting on a foreign throne.
#31
When Michael Jackson granted Weird Al Yankovic permission to do "Fat" (a parody of "Bad"), Jackson allowed him to use the same set built for his own "Badder" video from the Moonwalker film. Yankovic said that Jackson's support helped to gain approval from other artists he wanted to parody.
#32
After Columbine, Marilyn Manson wrote an article condemning the media’s coverage of the event. In it he writes, “the media, since their inception, have turned criminals into folk heroes. They just created two new ones... Don’t be surprised if every kid who gets pushed around has two new idols.”
#33
The cast of FRIENDS each made $1M per episode in the final two seasons and now make $20M per year per cast member for reruns. The show still generates $1B/year for Warner Bros. All thanks to David Schwimmer encouraging the cast to negotiate as a team.
Image credits: imsiq
#34
John Krasinski fought for a deaf actress Millicent Simmonds to be cast in 'A Quiet Place'; she taught everyone sign language on set.
#35
In 1954, Ernest Hemingway survived two plane crashes in two days. He was presumed dead almost 24 hours later until he was spotted coming out of the jungle carrying bananas and a bottle of gin.
Image credits: armyfidds
#36
Samuel L. Jackson heard someone repeating his Ezekiel 25:17 speech to him, he turned to discover it was Marlon Brando who gave him his number. When Jackson called, it was a Chinese restaurant. But when he asked for Brando, he picked up. It was Brando's way of screening calls.
#37
Martin Short, Steve Martin and Tom Hanks have regular ‘colonoscopy parties’ where they prep together overnight and share one car on the ride to get their colonoscopies the next day.
Image credits: BarelyLegalSeagull
#38
A majority of the people Christopher Walken interacted with as a child were non-native English speakers, including his father. Walken attributes his unique halting speaking style to watching people hesitate to think of the right English word.
#39
Michael Jordan once tipped a waitress a $5 chip for bringing him a drink. Wayne Gretzky stopped the waitress, removed the $5 chip, grabbed one of the many $100 chips on Jordan’s side of the table, and gave it to her. Then he said, "That's how we tip in Las Vegas, Michael."
#40
Jim Carey used to get to do stand up in his 7th grade class. He used humor to fit in and his teacher made a deal with him - if he was quiet all day he would get 15 minutes at the end of class where he did stand up using material from life, the class, or doing impressions of faculty members.
#41
Nas listed his then 7-year-old daughter, Destiny Jones, as an executive producer on his fifth studio album Stillmatic to ensure she would always receive royalty checks from the album.
#42
Fred Rogers proposed to his wife Joanne via letter. When she received it, Joanne rushed to a payphone to respond. She was so nervous that when Fred answered the phone she was focused on the phone booth graffiti and greeted him by saying, "Sh*t." Fred laughed and she agreed to marry him.
#43
Angelina Jolie once tried to hire a hitman to k*ll her, because she felt that a murder would be easier on her family than her committing s*icide. The would-be-hitman talked her out of it by asking her to wait a month.
Image credits: sl1878
#44
When former 'Tonight Show' host Johnny Carson died in 2005, 'Late Show' host David Letterman recited a comedic monologue at the beginning of the show, revealing later that every joke had been written by Carson, who had been sending in one or two jokes a week during his retirement.
#45
William Shatner interviewed several of his fellow cast members, for his book Star Trek Memories. Shatner was taken aback to discover the negative memories some of them from working with him and James Doohan refused to meet Shatner at all.
#46
Mike Judge moved to Texas and a storm blew off a part of his fence. After his new neighbors fixed it for him, no questions asked, it became the basis for King Of The Hill - "about neighbors who... ultimately, do the right thing and do right by people and are basically good people."
#47
Steve Jobs never coded for Apple. According to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, he didn't do any original design and one of Apple's earliest employees also stated that Woz was the inventor while Jobs was the marketing person.
#48
Sir Ian McKellen came out accidentally, before he'd told his family, during a BBC radio debate on the anti-homosexuality Section 28 legislation.
#49
The Animal Planet reality series ‘River Monsters’ ended because star Jeremy Wade was able to catch essentially every exceptionally large freshwater fish species on earth, leaving no remaining content for the show.
Image credits: the_freshest_scone
#50
Dr. Phil lost his license to practise psychology in 2006. Therefore, all guests on his TV show must sign a contract stating they are only there to receive "advice" from an individual, not a psychologist.
Image credits: truehalf
