Celebrity Hangover Stories
From Tom Arnold to Gerard Butler, 12 celebs share their darkest morning-after moments.
In honor of The Hangover III, we asked 12 celebs to share their own darkest morning-after moments. The next time you’re curled up in a ball, quietly weeping, trying to muster the strength to order an egg sandwich, remember these pearls of wisdom, courtesy of Tom Arnold: “The only thing that cures a hangover is more alcohol and drugs.”
Photo Courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures
Ron Perlman
“Southern Comfort, back in the ’60s, that was the one that informed the rest of my drinking to date. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a lot of doozies, probably four or five dozen really, really sick, twisted hangovers. But the Southern Comfort one was the one where you have to have your face up on the toilet bowl, because it’s cool and you’re burning up and you need to be by the bowl anyways. That was as messed up from a frolicking evening as I’ve ever been.”
Tommy Chong
“God, that goes back a lot of years because I quit drinking. I guess it was after a Champagne binge a good 30-odd years ago. That next morning I woke up, and it felt like there was a desert in my mouth. Champagne goes down easy, but oh my god, the headache. It was horrible. I realized that this was happening too often. I’m a body builder from way back, so I just quit drinking. Cold turkey.”
Belinda Carlisle
“In New York, back in 1980. I was at Danceteria and I drank I don’t know how many White Russians. But I was topless on the dance floor, and then I had to be carried home and put to bed and I literally lay in bed for three days afterward. I must have had alcohol poisoning. Those were the days! Even the smell of Kahlua or anything sweet and milky…I mean, I haven’t had a drink in eight years, but even when I was drinking, the smell of Kahlua will make me wretch, honestly.”
H. Jon Benjamin
“I’ve had a lot of bad hangovers, but I think there was one when I was in Paris for the bicentennial party, and I fell asleep on the hood of a car. I was woken up 40 minutes later by a street cleaner who was spraying water – they were just spraying water everywhere and I got water on me. It was like a high-powered water gun that was cleaning the streets. It was going and cleaning the cars as well, so that felt bad. I think number two was – and I feel bad about this, but – 9/11, when I lived in Tribeca. So I’ve had a lot of traumatic wake-ups. I really have to pick my nights better.”
Tom Arnold
“Man, from ’75 to ’89 I had so many. I mean, pretty much every day. What I do know is that I haven’t had a drink since December 10th ’89, but – and I recommend this to all your readers – the only thing that cures a hangover is more alcohol and drugs. It doesn’t have to be in that order; you might want to pace it. I woke up Sunday with a horrible food hangover, which is the same kind of hangover, because with a booze hangover, that’s from all the alcohol turning to sugar. A day like the one after my birthday, when I ate the whole cake, those hangovers are very comparable to my drug and alcohol hangovers from the ’80s. And you’re fucked, because since I can’t use drugs and alcohol, there’s really no cure and so it’s much worse.”
Paul F. Tompkins
“Oh boy. There was a Thanksgiving, it was the year after my mother died and I was with my soon-to-be-wife and I went to Philadelphia to spend Thanksgiving with my family. That night we got together with my cousins and I was just drinking like crazy and we got into some big protracted fight about gay marriage, you know, me and my cousins, and it was just – we drank until dawn. We drank until the sun came up and then I passed out in their living room and I unfortunately left my phone charging in the other room, so my wife, who had gone home hours before, had no idea where I was and what was going on. And she’s calling me every 10 minutes and assuming that I am dead, and finally my cousin came home from work and I was still there and he said, ‘Hey your phone is ringing.’ So I got picked up by my wife, she came and got me. We were staying with my brother-in-law and my sister-in-law and all day I just sat on the couch immobile. We watched movies all day and I was immobile. There was a plate of food in front of me that I could not touch. That was tough. That took days to recover from.”
Gerard Butler
“Oh my God, that’s tough – there’s a lot of competition for that one. I haven’t had a drink in 15 years, but one time I went on a cruise ship and had about 17 Long Island iced teas and 17 Heinekens – I know because they gave me the bill at the end! By that night we were in the middle of the Caribbean and I was hanging off the ship, practically into the ocean, shouting, “Abandon ship!” They almost threw me off the ship the next day, but they didn’t have to, since I spent three days in bed, sick with a mixture of hangover and sea sickness. It was the only time I’ve ever been in Venezuela and I couldn’t get out of my room!”
Jim Jeffries
“I got into a fist fight with a manger of a comedy club – when I woke up in the morning I only remembered the fight, not the reason for the fight. It turned out it was because I was saying Bill Burr was a better comedian then me and he said, ‘No, I think you’re better then Bill Burr,’ so I told him to fuck off and I hit him, haha! It was a fight over a compliment!”
Trevor Moore
“God, there’s been so many. One time I was hanging out at a beach house with a whole bunch of people and they had a Labor Day thing where everybody’s drinking. I found that they had that iced tea vodka and lemonade flavored vodka, too, so I was like, ‘Oh, you can make iced tea and lemonade and drink those all day.’ I wasn’t thinking, I thought it was vodka with lemonade and with iced tea. But it’s really just vodka that’s flavored, so I was actually just drinking vodkas all day in huge glasses. I was drinking and drinking and not even close to realizing – it wasn’t until the end of the night that somebody was like, ‘You know you’re just mixing vodka with vodka?’ At that point I’d been pretty far gone and started calling my parents and grandparents like, ‘Hey!’ just being chatty. That was pretty rough the next morning.”
Diamond Dallas Page
“One night I started off drinking wine, then it went to beer, because they didn’t have any good wine at the bar and then it shifted over. This was before I even knew how bad energy drinks were for you, and I was taking Red Bull and mixing it with vodka, a splash of OJ, and triple sec. Then I started drinking shooters of Jägermeister. I think I was 45 at the time – that hangover was like, sick to my stomach, it was burning so bad I felt I wanted to turn it inside out. I was in bed for two days! I can’t look at Jägermeister still.”
Evan Handler
“Oh, they were bad. The worst hangover I ever had was when I was a student at Julliard at 18- or 19-years-old, and I was invited by Jann Wenner’s personal cook to go to his birthday party at the Lone Star Cafe, I think it might have been. And I found myself standing next to Mick Jagger, and at the time he had a big reddish beard, and I got myself drunk enough to be able tell him that it was a pleasure to be in the same room with him, which is really not much to come up with anyway. And Jann Wenner played in the band that night where they did reworked versions of current songs. So Bob Dylan’s ‘You Gotta Serve Somebody’ became ‘You Gotta Suck Somebody,’ and at the end they smashed all the instruments, and I stole the bass and went home to the East Village, and had to call in sick for school the next day because I was in such bad shape.”
Rebecca Mader
“My sister came to visit me in New York in May and it was epic. It was nutburgers, it was my birthday and her birthday. The next day we were trying to go for breakfast and we couldn’t even walk to the diner, we’re holding onto each other. I ended up clinging to a lamppost and she was taking pictures of me going, ‘III caaann’t dooo iiiitt.’ We must have looked ridiculous, but it was amazing. We still text each other about it. It was one for the books.”
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