If you’ve read anything about early nineties action star Steven Seagal, you know that he’s either the most fascinating man in the world or one of the world’s biggest liars, or possibly the former by virtue of the latter. The honorary citizen of Serbia and friend to Vladimir Putin has made headlines recently for putting his bulletproof Arizona mansion on the market. Which would certainly match his specially made, bulletproof kimono. Bulletproof stuff is to Steven Seagal what leopard print is to your kooky aunt.
It turns out there may be a good reason for that. According to ER actress Julianna Margulies, Seagal, who has moonlighted as a police officer and once destroyed the house of a suspected cock-fighter with a tank, is so careless with firearms that she once found one in his sofa cushions.
Margulies described the incident on the Drew Barrymore show this week, which she says occurred during one of the many creepy one-on-one auditions with Seagal that actresses have alleged over the years. She described meeting the sleepy actor in 1991, during an audition for Out For Justice (that’s the one in which Seagal plays Gino Felino, featuring the admittedly awesome action scene in which Felino dispatches numerous henchman with a pool ball stuffed into a bar towel while trying to find out why Richie did Bobby Lupo).
From The Independent:
Despite being told that the casting director would be in the room with her and Seagal, Margulies said she arrived to discover the casting director was absent.
When she arrived, she discovered that it was just Seagal in the room, and the pair began discussing a scene in the film.
“It was a frightening moment,” Margulies said. “He asked me to sit on this couch and underneath this cushion… I jumped up, there was something hard [beneath the cushion], and he pulled out a gun. And he said, ‘Oh, I must have left my gun there.'”
“Oh, was that my gun under there? Pardon me, I’m so clumsy!” It sounds very much like Steven Seagal was an early proponent of the D.E.N.N.I.S. system from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. “You know, they can’t refuse, because of the implication.”
Though it doesn’t seem to have worked out that way for Seagal this time. Instead, he simply invited Margulies into his bedroom where he read her palm and told her about her organs.
“He put the gun down so I was calming down a little bit and he read my palm and told me that he was a healer and told me I had weak kidneys,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Is this the shtick that works on women?'”
After that, Margulies says, she left. In any case, it’s clear that this is a man containing arguably unprecedented multitudes. Steven Seagal: aikido master, possible descendant of a 17th century Buddhist monk, and, it seems, one of history’s most skilled ladies men. Not many pick-up artists are bold enough to use palm science to neg their date’s kidneys. But say what you will of Steven Seagal, he’s nothing if not a man of bold moves. Not fast moves necessarily, but bold ones.
https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1283236914124910592?lang=en
What a wonderful world.
Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.
