Celebs With The Creepiest Hobbies

Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld collect cars. Tom Hanks collects antique typewriters. Learning about these kinds of hobbies usually adds a layer of depth to these already likable celebrities, and makes us not feel so bad about all the money we throw away on our own horde of useless tchotchkes. But some stars have a pastime so strange it's difficult to understand how they would even get into it in the first place. Here are some famous folks who spend their off-time in seriously creepy ways.

While Christian Bale may have a fascination with what happens to things when they're dead, it seems like Angelina Jolie might have a preoccupation with helping things get that way, because she collects knives and daggers. On Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Jolie revealed her love of the stabby arts by saying, "I've collected weapons since I was a little girl." She also said her fascination started after going to a Renaissance Faire and seeing all of the beautiful blades, then she demonstrated tricks with a butterfly knife, which isn't terrifying at all. But Jolie doesn't just keep her knives in a cabinet for show. Sometimes she breaks them out during sex.

Telling ABC News that while her knife collection is now basically just antiques, earlier in her teenage years, she once busted them out in the bedroom. "I didn't ever feel enough. I didn't feel close enough to another person, I didn't feel alive enough. ... Nothing ever felt real and honest enough. And so because I had knives around ... early on in my first sexual relationship, I got knives out and had a night where we attacked each other," Jolie said. "It didn't hurt, it was cold, and it felt so primitive and it felt so honest," she added. She also said she still has the scars from that violent and sexy night. Alrighty then. We think we're good here. No need to find out any more about that, right? Moving on.

This one is probably the most well-known creepy hobby on the list, and maybe on its face, it doesn't actually seem that strange. But to see Mike Tyson, the ferocious boxer and guy who once bit off a chunk of Evander Holyfield's ear, snuggling his tattooed face up to his racing pigeons is unquestionably unsettling. The backstory of how he got into collecting and racing pigeons is equally unsettling. According to The LA Times, Tyson took on the hobby as a young boy to escape constant bullying in his tough Brooklyn neighborhood. But it didn't exactly work. In one gruesome incident, a bully grabbed one of Tyson's birds as he was carrying them home, and "twisted its head off and sprayed blood all over him." Tyson says this is the first time he ever threw a punch, leading him down his path to boxing infamy.

Aside from that horrifying origin story, there is even more material out there regarding Mike Tyson's pigeon hobby that makes it seem creepy, including an anecdote about his girlfriend eating one of them, the fact that he has pageants for them, and this clip of him basically falling in love with one as he gently pets it. But overall, you get the sense that Tyson actually gets a lot of fulfillment out of his avian obsession. "This is something that has really brought meaning to me and my life. This is not a hobby. This is something we're going to do until the day we die. I love being in my pigeon world. It brings me a calm," Tyson once said. In an episode of Taking On Tyson, the former heavyweight champ also explained that his affinity for the birds has to do with their loyalty. "As long as he's alive and his heart's pumping, he'll come back," Tyson says almost wistfully. Yep, alright, now it's back to creepy again.

Even though Simon Cowell was a wealthy music producer long before his American Idol debut, his fame really took off when he made a name for himself crushing the dreams of hopeful singers on live television. And Cowell must have really taken a shine to the role of creepy villain, because he's apparently extended that personality to his real life. In an interview with The Mirror, the British bully admitted that one of his hobbies is spying on his neighbors with a telescope. Yep. Referencing the Dudley Moore film, 10, in which Moore uses a telescope to spy on naked women at his porn producer neighbor's house, Cowell said, "I saw that Dudley Moore film and it was great. Afterwards, I got a telescope installed in my kitchen so I can spy on people. I look out over the Hollywood Hills into my neighbours' gardens. It's an amazing view. It isn't powerful enough to see into their homes – so you can't see them in the shower – but you can see into their gardens." Cowell also added, "It's great fun. I just like to keep an eye on what is happening."

Not surprisingly, Cowell's neighbors haven't lined up to bring a welcoming plate of brownies to The X-Factor star's door, and they're not shy about talking to the press about him. "I have spoken to several builders and workers at the house, and they say they have to park in the street because Cowell doesn't want them on his drive. Of course, what he says goes, but what Cowell doesn't realise is that it is making life miserable for everyone else on his street," one neighbor told The Daily Mail. Hold up, they're just mad about street parking? Wait until they find out about creepy Cowell's peeping pastime.

Lucy Lawless will forever be known for her role in Xena: Warrior Princess, but the prolific actress has done much more than the basic cable fantasy series that ended in 2001. In 2015, she was in Shreveport, LA shooting Salem, when Lawless revealed her hidden hobby to Stuff. "I spend a lot of time in the courthouse of whatever city I am at. I watch the criminal trials and I get to know the judges and the bailiffs and even the families sometimes," Lawless said.

Lawless claims this unusual hobby has to do with figuring out what's really going on in the community. "You get to see patterns of behaviour and it's been a really huge education. They call this place the buckle of the Bible Belt, so you have a lot of convention and religiosity but you also have a lot of libertarians and free-thinking people and an arts community," she said. We have to think its a little off-putting to someone potentially facing hard time to look out at the courtroom and see Xena sitting there taking notes for her personal sociology experiment. Besides, has she never heard of the library? Or the Internet?