Celebrities spend so much of their lives on camera that you’d think they’d be totally immune to awkward moments. However, they embarrass themselves just like the rest of us!
Here are 23 embarrassing celebrity interview moments:
1. Appearing on the French talk show Quotidien in 2026, Hailey Bieber claimed that her famously Canadian husband, Justin Bieber, is French. The moment went viral, with many viewers writing her comment off as very “American” of her.
To Hailey’s credit, Justin does have French Canadian and Acadian ancestry through his mother, and his maternal grandmother grew up in a largely Francophone community (Hearst, Ontario).
2. In a moment that will likely haunt Tom Cruise forever, he jumped on the couch to demonstrate his love for his then-partner Katie Holmes while appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2005.
In his 2023 book Yearbook, Seth Rogen recalled a bizarre five-hour meeting he and Judd Apatow had with Tom Cruise in 2006, when Tom was exploring comedy. During the meeting, Tom brought up his infamous Oprah interview.
He allegedly told them, “Well, yeah, they’re making it seem like I’m losing my mind. There’s a coordinated effort to make it appear that way. [Seth asked, ‘Who would do that?’] The pharmaceutical industry. Because my exposure of their fraud has cost them SO much money that they’re desperate. They’re scrambling, and they’re doing everything they can to discredit me so I won’t hurt sales anymore. … They edited it to make it look so much worse than it was.”
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3. When Esquire interviewed Miles Teller in 2015, he wanted to try a piece of the writer Anna Peele’s pork belly, but after struggling to cut it, he had her do it for him. She wrote, “You have to cut his meat for him, a man who ten minutes earlier showed you an iPhone photo of his back muscles to prove how strong he is. He wants you to cut it small. ‘I don’t have back teeth. I literally have four teeth.’ Not true. He’s right, though, this pork belly is really hard to cut. But still.”
Steve Granitz / WireImage / Via Getty
4. In 2021, Don Cheadle casually mentioned his age on Kevin Hart’s talk show Hart to Heart. Shocked, Kevin failed to keep his thoughts inside his head.
5. When Jennifer Garner appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 2003, she paused the interview to correct Conan’s grammar. However, after the commercial break, he brought out a dictionary and proved her wrong.
6. In Bella Hadid’s 2017 Sneaker Shopping interview with Complex, the answer she gave about her “sneaker turn-offs” was so cringey that it spawned a meme.
7. At the 2022 Venice International Film Festival, Harry Styles accidentally created a meme of his own. During the Don’t Worry Darling press conference, he made this nonsensical statement: “My favorite thing about the movie is, like, it feels like a movie.”
The face that costar Chris Pine made in reaction to his comments went viral.
8. Here’s one that belongs in the celebrity interview hall of fame, IMO! When Sukihana appeared on Bobbi Athoff’s The Really Good Podcast in 2024, she confused “musician” with “magician.” Then, when Bobbi tried to clarify, Sukihana doubled down.
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9. In 2013, Romeo and Juliet actor Douglas Booth got a little big for his britches. He told the Evening Standard that it was hard to explain his new life as a celebrity to his non-famous friends. He said, “They’ll say: ‘Mate! Last night we went out in Leeds and got so messed up!’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah…last night I was in New York with Hillary Clinton.’ … The other day, I stopped in Piccadilly and sat on the Eros statue, just taking in London and the sights and sounds, and thought, ‘One day soon this is going to be impossible.'”
Relativity Media/courtesy Everett Collection
10. In 2015, Raven-Symoné discussed her AncestryDNA test results with E! News, but she mixed up “continent” with “country.”
11. In the 2023 Netflix docuseries The Beckhams, Victoria Beckham claimed she grew up “working class” — only to be playfully called out by her own husband, David.
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For what it’s worth, Victoria embraced the viral moment and sold “My Dad Had A Rolls-Royce” t-shirts.
12. In a 2010 interview with New Zealand’s C4, Justin Bieber — bless his heart — seemingly didn’t understand that German is a language… and insisted that Americans in general wouldn’t get it either.
13. In 2021, Dixie D’Amelio fully admitted to Vogue that she decided to skip college because she was too embarrassed by the possibility of hearing her own music at a party.
14. On BBC Radio 1’s The School Run segment in 2015, Demi Lovato mistook “genes” for “jeans.” So, the students she was riding with had to explain the difference.
15. In another 2015 interview, Demi seemingly forgot that “dish” is a synonym for “meal.”
However, they later insisted it was all a big joke, tweeting, “For anybody who actually thinks I misunderstood the ‘favorite dish’ question – you clearly don’t get my sense of humor”
16. When Mark Wahlberg appeared on The Graham Norton Show alongside Sarah Silverman in 2013, he interrupted her, pulled her into his arms, and climbed into the host’s lap. He was reportedly drunk at the time.
Later that year, Graham Norton told Digital Spy, “I think the three of us had met a lot of drunk people over the years. Mark Wahlberg’s been on the show before, and he’s a really lovely guy. We’ve all done that thing where you suddenly realize, ‘I’m by far the drunkest person at this dinner party’ and you don’t know how that happened. It was a bit like that, so I don’t judge him harshly at all. It was just a thing.”
17. After the 1995 VMAs, Madonna was in the middle of an interview with MTV VJ Kurt Loder when Courtney Love threw things at the pop singer, then totally hijacked the interview!
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18. When Crispin Glover appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman in 1987, he tried to get the host to arm wrestle him, then almost kicked him in the head, which prompted David to leave the set.
However, in 2014, the actor sort of hinted that he’d been doing a bit on the Late Show. On The Sam Roberts Show, he said, “What I say is, in popular media, I neither confirm nor deny that I was on the David Letterman show.”
Some speculate that he did the Letterman interview in character as Rubin from Rubin & Ed, a movie that didn’t come out until 1991.
19. Promoting her 2012 song “Elephant” on Daybreak, Alexandra Burke claimed she was bringing the common phrase “elephant in the room” to the UK. However, there was just one problem — she was about a century too late! Per Yahoo, the phrase “elephant in the room” is credited to Ivan Krylov, a Russian poet, in 1814 and appeared in the British Journal of Education at least 100 years ago.
In 2021, the clip resurfaced and went viral on Instagram.
Alexandra told Tyla, “Yeah, it’s quite funny! It makes people smile. It’s such a light-hearted page to make people laugh, which is what we’ve all really needed over the last year or so. We all need to have a good laugh, and if an Instagram page can provide that to people, then we’re all winning at life!”
20. On a 1970 episode of The Dick Cavett Show, Husbands director John Cassavetes and actors Peter Falk and Ben Gazzar — who later admitted to drinking before the show —shouted, smoked, took off their socks and shoes, and threw themselves into a pile on the floor. Their behavior was so egregious that it drove the host to briefly walk off stage!
In 2014, Dick told the New Yorker, “It was out of the blue. It was astonishing. I could not believe it while it was happening. I think I watched it a year or so ago, and it seemed even worse than I remembered it. When the circus was going on, with shoes coming off and smelling each other’s feet — which may be an image I have conjured, but something very close to it — and falling down, as if that were funny, just a bunch of louts out encouraging each other in their stupidity, it was … I had a mixed feeling as it was happening. I knew it would be entertaining in a certain way involving the word ‘horror.'”
21. In 2013, Jesse Eisenberg did an infamous interview with Univision host Romina Puga, which was so bad that she later described the experience as “self-esteem butchering.”
On her blog, Romina wrote, “So, I was just humiliated by Jesse Eisenberg…When the five minute ‘interview’ (more like self-esteem butchering) were finally over, I went behind a curtain to wait for the memory cards from the interview. I peaked around the curtain to ask Jesse about his neighborhood in New York (he lives a few blocks from where I used to live) and he immediately says, ‘You’re still here?'”
22. When Jay Leno hosted The Tonight Show live from the Cheers bar in 1993, the ENTIRE cast showed up drunk. Aside from Rhea Perlman, they were criticized for acting like “jerks” and “idiots.”
Jay told Herald TV, “Those people were so drunk I don’t know what else we could have done in a live situation. You don’t tell these people how to behave. Nobody tells them what to do… Was it a great show? No. But I guess you have to expect people to show up totally drunk when you do a live show from a real bar. In a real bar, everybody drinks real drinks.”
He also said that, the next day, Ted Danson sent him flowers as an apology, and George Wendt called him as well.
23. And finally, on a 1994 episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jay Leno, comedian Bobcat Goldthwait totally derailed the interview by pulling a lighter out of his pocket and setting his chair ON FIRE.
The incident wasn’t scripted or staged. Bobcat later pleaded no contest to recklessly setting the fire. He was then required to pay a $3,888 fine and to record a PSA for a local burn center. He also got three years of informal probation.
What other embarrassing celeb interview moments can you think of? Let us know in the comments or in the anonymous comments box below!
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