The phone in Russell Crowe’s hotel room would ring, and the voice on the other end always sounded like trouble. Crowe told the story on The Graham Norton Show in May 2016, sitting next to Ryan Gosling. The caller, he said, “would always start off being kind of gruff like he was the hotel management, there was some kind of problem.”
There wasn’t a problem. There wasn’t a hotel manager either. The voice belonged to Michael Jackson, and the two men had never met. “I never met him,” Crowe told The Guardian in 2015. A few weeks later he put it even more plainly on NBC’s TODAY show: “I never shook his hand or anything.”
How did Michael keep finding him? Crowe checked into hotels under a made-up name. Somehow Michael learned what it was. “It didn’t matter where I was, he’d ring up,” Crowe told The Guardian. By his own count, the calls went on for “two or three” years.
The hotel act came in more than one flavor. Back in 2013, Crowe told The Sun about the most dramatic version. “He’d ring me and in a strong voice and say, ‘There is an emergency and you need to leave the building,'” he said. When Crowe asked who was calling, the stern voice gave up the game: “Do not worry Russell, just kidding, this is Michael.”
On Norton’s couch, three years later, Crowe remembered the same giveaway a little differently. Michael would call the hotel, ask for his room and put on funny voices, and then came the line he heard again and again: “Don’t worry, it’s only Michael.”
Russell Crowe tells the whole story on The Graham Norton Show
Russell starts the story right at the beginning and tells it through to about 1:17, from the gruff “hotel management” voice to the moment Michael gives himself away.
So what did the most famous singer on earth actually say once he had one of Hollywood’s toughest leading men on the line? Sometimes it was a joke straight off the school playground. Crowe repeated one to The Guardian, word for word.
“Is Mr Wall there? Is Mrs Wall there? Are there any Walls there? Then what’s holding the roof up? Ha ha.”
Michael had tracked down Crowe’s secret hotel name, got put through to his room and asked him where the walls went. Crowe said it was the kind of prank call you made “when you were 10,” then added, “You’re supposed to grow out of doing that, right?”
He didn’t sound annoyed about it, though. “If you know Michael, then you know that that’s a real thing,” Crowe told TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie. “It’s just something that he liked to do.” Michael “would just call me every now and then and put on his funny voices,” he said.
Russell Crowe acts out Michael’s “Mr. Wall” joke for HuffPost
Russell does Michael’s “Oh don’t worry Russell, it’s only Michael” line at about 0:35, and the “Mr. Wall” joke, roof and all, comes at about 0:52.
Crowe never got a handshake, a photo or a single meeting out of any of it. What he got was a hotel phone that kept ringing in whatever city he was in, a fake manager with bad news and the King of Pop on the other end of the line, asking after the Walls.