Robert Bartleh Cummings, Rob Zombie to us, may be best known for sporting crusted dreadlocks and high-fiving Satan, but the down-to-earth writer-director of the Halloween remake knows from pranks, too.
Sporting a Hell's Angels surfing T-shirt and covered in tattoos depicting The Creature and The Phantom of the Opera, the 42-year-old told Radar about some backstage clowning on the set of his revamped version of John Carpenter's 1978 classic horror flick (Halloween opens Aug. 31). The victim: legendary actor Malcolm McDowell, who plays Dr. Samuel Loomis.
"He got really pissed at me," says Zombie, er, Cummings. "It was the last day of shooting, and it was sort of the scene where he's confronting Michael Myers and he's doing his, 'Michael, it's not her fault, it's my fault,' and he's going into his big read. And I just felt, like, It's just taking him too long to get through this. And I told the guy, Tyler [Mane, who plays Myers], 'Half-way through this thing, just grab him!' Like, Michael Myers can't stand to hear Dr. Loomis talk anymore. And he lunged at Malcolm. And Malcolm, like, screamed —like, 'Ooo oww!' And he was not happy. He was pissed. He was, like, 'I'm gonna get you, you mother f***er."