Christian O’Connell Recalls Awkward Bruno/Sensei Interviews

Radio DJ, TV host, writer and comedian Christian O’Connell has interview some famous names over the years.  Among them were action man Bruce Willis and Zen Master Steven Seagal.  However, O’Connell in a new discussion with news.com.au says that these interviews weren’t exactly straight forward.

First, he talks about interviewing Walter_B, and was warned that the actor was not in a good mood.

“I was like, what the f**k is he not in a good mood for? It was the beginning of the day, why was he in a bad mood already? He’s a multi-millionaire who’s staying in a five-star hotel. Cry me a river.

“I remember being really irritated and I thought that if he begins pissing around I’m just gonna walk out, I can’t be bothered. So I go in and at the start said, ‘I hear you’re in a bad mood.’ He looks at me as if to say, ‘The f**king balls on this guy,’ and he goes, ‘No!’ He was like a kid.

“Because I’d confronted him about it he laughed a bit and said, ‘Who told you that?’ And I said, ‘They did out there. They’re terrified of you.’ He started to laugh and then he told me why he was in a bad mood. His eggs hadn’t been done right at breakfast and I said, ‘I’ve got to be honest, that would piss me off too.’

“We started just pissing around about scrambled eggs and how he likes them done … The first five minutes of the interview was all about scrambled eggs and he quickly got out of his bad mood.

Sounds about right, but good on him for putting Willis in his place early on.  Then though, O’Connell talks about messing with The Master.  Leading into an interview with Sensei Seagal, O’Connell, rather than doing his own research, got an assistant to rustle up some trivia for the interview.  This backfired…

“It was in the early days of research on the internet so my lazy producer just found a load of stuff which was BS,” he said, adding that he “should have checked the research” himself.

The interview was prerecorded an hour before O’Connell’s radio show was due to start.

“We called him at home and he was playing a guitar,” the presenter told news.com.au.

“The whole interview, he just wasn’t up for it. He was mumbling. The first question I asked was, ‘Is it true you’ve got an aftershave coming out called The Scent of Action?’ and he literally goes berserk.

… I thought Scent of Action was a real product!  It wasn’t?  But O’Connell continued…

“After about five minutes my producer gave me a sign to wrap it up and I remember thinking, ‘This is so bad that I’m going to keep going now. I’m not going to bail.’ He didn’t want to answer any of the questions and he kept plucking that bloody guitar and I was thinking to myself, ‘This is amazing. I’m going to play this whole thing out as the worst interview I’ve ever done.’”

And that’s exactly what he did.

“I started my show by saying, ‘I’ve just done an interview with Steven Seagal and it is butt-clenchingly awful.’ It got the biggest reaction to any interview I’ve ever done.”

If I ever find Sensei Seagal’s aftershave on eBay, I promise to review it in-depth.