Gary Busey Has Been to Heaven and Thinks You’re Doing It Wrong

Gary Busey is one of my absolute favorite reality TV personalities, because he is a winning combination of crazy and nice. Even though he’s kind of nutty and would probably drive me crazy in real life, he’s engaging on TV and is eminently quotable. (Ex: He is obsessed with acronyms and says that Bible stands for Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.) In an interview, actor Curtis Armstrong (he played Booger in the Revenger of the Nerds movies) told an amazing story about working with Gary Busey. The story speaks for itself, so here goes:

We were shooting this movie—which is a horrible movie—and he was supposed to come back from the dead. And he of course, Gary Busey, supposedly had done this—he’d been in an accident and died and came back. He showed up on a set made to look like Heaven, and he looked around and said, “I can’t play this scene.” They were three days behind at this point. But Busey said, “It’s nothing like this. I’ve been to Heaven and it doesn’t look like this. That sofa’s all wrong. That mirror is ridiculous. They don’t even have mirrors!” It was ridiculous. He was completely nuts about the design of Heaven.But then on top of it, one of the guys playing an angel, had also died and come back. And this guy got into an argument with Busey about the way Heaven looked! The two of them wound up coming to blows and they had to send everybody home. So there you go. That’s what we were working with.