Christian O'Connell and Jack Post from GOLD104.3. Photo / Supplied
Christian O'Connell and Jack Post from GOLD104.3. Photo / Supplied
Name an A-list celebrity and there's a good chance that Christian O'Connell has interviewed them.
The radio personality has had the pleasure, and in some cases the displeasure, of meeting the world's biggest stars during his many years on UK radio.
Earlier this year the comedian moved to Australia with his wife and kids to host the The Christian O'Connell Breakfast Show on Melbourne's GOLD104.3 FM alongside Jack Post, aka Cackling Jack from Hamish and Andy, reports news.com.au.
In an interview with news.com.au, O'Connell was more than happy to spill the beans about his best and worst celebrity encounters - including one that he described as "butt-clenchingly awful".
"When I first turned up they warned me that he wasn't in a great mood," O'Connell said.
"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.
Why so serious, Bruce? Photo / Getty Images
"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.
"So Bruce Willis could have been terrible but it ended up being good fun."
CHRISTOPHER LLOYD
"The one that will always haunt me, and it was my fault, is Christopher Lloyd who played Emmett 'Doc' Brown in the great Back to the Future movies," O'Connell told news.com.au.
"I got the chance to interview him and I had to see his new movie beforehand. But I said to my producer, 'I really don't want to go and see this movie.' It was called something like Furry Vengeance."
O'Connell convinced his producer to see it instead so he could take notes and pass them on. But it wasn't until Lloyd rocked up to the radio studio for the live interview that his producer revealed he didn't actually see the movie either.
If only Christian O'Connell could go back in time and change that interview with Christopher Lloyd. Photo / Getty Images
"My producer said, 'I think he's the voice of a talking raccoon and it's a cartoon movie'," the GOLD104.3 host recalled.
"Christopher Lloyd comes in and I said, 'I'm so excited to meet you. I saw your movie, Furry Vengeance and that raccoon that you did the voice of, I just love those funny cartoon movies.' He goes, 'there's no raccoon in it. It's not a cartoon movie, you've obviously not seen it.'
"He'd caught me out live on air," O'Connell said. "The rest of the half an hour was awful, just awful. People were texting into the show saying, 'You've embarrassed yourself, you shouldn't even have your own radio show you d**khead.'
"It was just terrible. I learnt from that, don't lie to people and go and see every single movie."
STEVEN SEAGAL
"Oh my god, that was both the best and worst interview I ever did," O'Connell said.
"This was about 12 years ago. I was given the opportunity to do a phone interview with Steven Seagal and I was so excited."
O'Connell had seen ALL of Seagal's movies and was worried that he was "too close" to the star's career so he asked his producer to suggest some questions that listeners might like to have answered.
"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.
Seagal didn't get on well with O'Connell, but is good mates with Putin. Photo / Getty Images
"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.
"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."
WILL FERRELL
"It's very odd how some celebrities still don't realise that if they're being interviewed, the more they give, the better the interview will be and then the more likely they are to shift tickets for people to go and see their crappy movie or whatever," O'Connell said.
"Will Ferrell gets that and is always a dream guest. He turns up and he knows what he has to do.
"I remember the first time I interviewed him was on a TV show I was doing. He was promoting Old School. Beforehand, we were just talking him through how the show would work. It was a live TV show in a room above a pub.
"[During the production meeting] he heard that I had a segment where I got these kids to come on and review the newspapers from that day with me. He said, 'do you want me to come on and just be in the background painting what they say?' I just went, 'absolutely.'
"We sent a producer out to an art supplies shop and he got this huge canvas … I've still got the painting that Will Ferrell did of that day's news. I shipped it out here to Australia with me."
Actor Will Ferrell. Photo / Getty Images
O'Connell is now about six weeks into his breakfast gig on GOLD104.3 and told news.com.au it has "surpassed my expectations of what I thought Australia and Melbourne would give me in terms of a new challenge".
"I've never been more excited to be on air and doing a radio show … I've been doing breakfast radio for 20 years in the UK and to be feeling that way after six weeks is great."
O'Connell also raved about his radio offsider, Jack Post, who radio fans might recall was the longtime "button pusher" for Hamish and Andy.
"I've known Hamish and Andy for years and last summer I was over in Australia … I met up with Andy Lee and he took me to my first AFL game and we ended up getting really drunk and that's when I mumbled to him, 'I might be getting a breakfast show out here,'" O'Connell recalled.
"I said, 'The only thing I'm worried about is who do I do it with?' … Jack was the first name he mentioned, so if those boys are recommending somebody, that's good enough for me.
"He's a funny guy, he's been trained by Hamish and Andy for 10 years and he's a very creative, talented kid."
