Entertainment reporter Richard Wilkins has revealed some of the more challenging celebrities he’s dealt with in an interview.
Simply Red frontman Mick Hucknall made the top of the list.
Wilkins shared in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald that the English singer, 62, is “probably the rudest person” he’d ever interviewed.
Wilkins said he had been asked to present Hucknall with a gold record at a record company function while Simply Red were touring Australia.
“Shook his hand, everything went all right,” Wilkins said.
The problem came the following day, when Wilkins, who was then working for MTV Australia, arrived at the since-demolished Sydney Entertainment Centre to interview Hucknall ahead of Simply Red’s concert that evening.
“I said, ‘G’day Mick’, held out my hand. He says, ‘I shook your hand last night, I don’t need to do it again’,” Wilkins revealed.
“He’s subsequently divulged that he used to hit it pretty hard back in the day, so I don’t know whether he was on good stuff the night before. I remember my boss saying to me that day, ‘If anyone ever treats you like that again, just walk out the door’.”
British actor Hugh Grant made the cut on Wilkins’ list, “I’ve always got on OK with Hugh Grant, but he can be very prickly,” he explained.
“And he’ll quite willingly tell you that the characters he plays are much nicer than the person he actually is. I MCed a publicity tour that he and Liz Hurley did. They were quite difficult to work with. He can be a prickly one.”
Not mentioned in the interview was Wilkins’ 2003 interview with music icon Prince, which he had previously named as the worst celebrity interview in his 2011 memoir Black Ties, Red Carpets, Green Rooms.
Wilkins went backstage at Prince’s Melbourne show to interview him and recalled he was told by Prince’s entourage that the exchange could only proceed if Wilkins also interviewed every member of Prince’s band, and included them in the TV segment.
He reluctantly accepted, but later found the band members weren’t too keen on a chat, including Prince.
“Ah f**k! This was going to be an unmitigated disaster and total embarrassment,” Wilkins wrote of the awkward encounter.
Image credit: Getty
This article first appeared on Over60.