Celebs Who Destroyed Their Careers With One Bad Interview

Bad interviews happen. Sometimes celebs are just having an off day, but they still have to manage to be engaging, charming, and polite when all they'd rather do is take a nap. Other times, they're doing a slew of back-to-back press conferences and interviews and they've already answered the same 20 questions 20 times each, so they get a little bored and cranky — or, alternatively, they start embellishing. Sometimes they can even be too trusting and get just a little too comfortable, accidentally spilling secrets they have no right sharing. In other instances, they're perfectly jovial and friendly, but if they make a joke or say something satirical, sarcastic, or in jest, it doesn't necessarily come off that way in print, leading to a lot of backlash that may very well be unwarranted.

Whatever the case may be, these stars all opened their mouths and inserted their feet during interviews, and it cost them in a big way in terms of their careers ... and not all of them were able to come back after their press gaffes.

Tom Cruise couldn't hide his crazy in his 2005 Today show interview with Matt Lauer. When Lauer asked Cruise about his criticism of Brooke Shields' use of antidepressants, the Scientology poster boy lashed out and called Lauer "glib," adding, "You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do." The actor continued, "You just communicate about it. If I want to know something, I go and find out. Because I don't talk about things that I don't understand." (It's worth noting that the Church Of Scientology is notoriously opposed to psychiatry.)

The incident wouldn't have been so bad, but Cruise was on a press tour so overblown that Lauer even asked him if his PDA with Holmes was a publicity stunt. The damage to his reputation was strong enough for Cruise to do just one movie a year until he re-entered the public's good graces with Tropic Thunder (2008) ... and he hasn't spoken publicly about Scientology since.

Lauer later told Howard Stern that Cruise's publicist had called before the Today segment aired to try to remove that portion of the interview and that Cruise had apologized to him. "There was maybe a Cold War period after that interview of about a year, he since has come forward and said, you know, that was a strange time in his life and he regrets the way it came across," Lauer revealed (via the Daily Mail). "[He] has gone out of his way to be awfully nice to me since then."

John Mayer's reputation never fully recovered after his February 2010 Playboy interview, and his single charting hasn't either. In the interview, Mayer held nothing back, sharing his wish to someday write  adult films and claiming ex-girlfriend Jennifer Aniston was "hoping it goes back to 1998." He also made a remark about only dating white women, essentially calling his, ahem, private parts racist. At one point, he even dropped the n-word.

His most infamous remarks, though, were about his celebrity ex Jessica Simpson. Comparing being intimate with her to using drugs, he said, "Sexually it was crazy ... It was like napalm, sexual napalm." Implying that Simpson had made him "want to quit the rest of [his] life," Mayer asked writer Rob Tannenbaum, "Did you ever say, 'I want to quit my life and just f**kin' snort you? If you charged me $10,000 to f**k you, I would start selling all my s**t just to keep f**king you.'" 

Of Mayer, Tannenbaum said, "When I met him in the kitchen of his L.A. home he was talking about not talking anymore: 'I think the world would be better off if I stopped doing interviews.'" Well, he wasn't wrong.

Like 5 Seconds of Summer, The Chainsmokers came off as trying so hard to be edgy that they just seemed sad and a bit lame in their September 2016 Billboard cover story.

Andrew Taggart told the magazine, "We rage every night. My mom's going to hate reading that, but she already knows." His DJ partner, Alex Pall, quipped, "But you'll never see us getting carried out of a club. We're way too good at drinking."

Both band members had live-in girlfriends at the time of the interview, but they still felt it appropriate to talk about their groupies. "Even before success, p***y was number one," Pall said. "Like, 'Why am I trying to make all this money?' I wanted to hook up with hotter girls. I had to date a model." Taggart added, "We're just frat bro dudes, you know what I mean? Loving ladies and stuff."

If you're into that "stuff," the band also revealed the size of their penises, measured "tip to tip." Classy.

In January 2007, ahead of the sixth season of American Idol, judge Paula Abdul wobbled, swayed, slurred, and generally spoke nonsensically through an interview, which went viral almost instantly. She later explained of the incident, "I did a big week of press all last week in New York, and on the third day I did one of those press junkets where you're in that one little room and you're looking at one camera and there are 30 cities talking into your ear. I guess Alabama was in my ear and so was Seattle at the same time, so I'm answering questions to the wrong answers of the cities ... Fatigue and exhaustion just added to the whole thing looking so disoriented. But no alcohol and no drugs, absolutely no!"

The Fox affiliate that conducted the interview corroborated Abdul's explanation, adding, "Rather than getting angry about these difficulties, or stopping the tour, Paula forged ahead and decided to have fun with the increasingly challenging situation. Unfortunately, because reporters and viewers were unaware of the situation, her humor was misconstrued."

Two years later, Abdul failed to negotiate a new American Idol contract, the New York Daily News reported, and her loopy reputation stuck for years until she nabbed a judging role on So You Think You Can Dance in 2013.

Tom Hiddleston is so naturally charming that it's hard to imagine any press event he does going poorly, but his February 2017 GQ interview following his split from Taylor Swift was just so painfully awkward.

Regarding his relationship with Swift, he told the interviewer, "Taylor is an amazing woman," adding, "She's generous and kind and lovely, and we had the best time." The writer, who apparently asked if the relationship was real (Hiddleston said it was), then asked about his infamous "I Heart T.S." tank. The actor replied, "The truth is, it was the Fourth of July and a public holiday and we were playing a game and I slipped and hurt my back. And I wanted to protect the graze from the sun and said, 'Does anyone have a T-shirt?' And one of her friends said, 'I've got this.' And we all laughed about it. It was a joke."

Hiddleston's earnestness kept him talking and talking, however — even causing him to show up at his interviewer's room at 6 a.m. to clarify points he'd made about his relationship with Swift. The article's writer noted that he was "crushed by the end of [the] relationship." C'mon, Loki. Buck up!

Since the bad interview and his ill-fated Swift romance emerged, Hiddleston's roles have seemed to dry up somewhat. Aside from his Loki reprisals and his role in Kong: Skull Island (2017), the theatrically gifted celeb has mostly voiceover work on his docket.