I’ve been waiting patiently for Terrence Howard to get more famous for years now, just so I can share with the general public what a glorious weirdo he is. He was a guest on Jimmy Fallon last night, where he seems to have traded his trademark jaunty hat for some kind of double scarf ensemble. At first I thought it was two separate scarves, but then he moved it and now I’m pretty sure it’s just one scarf, but like the kickass double-necked guitar of scarves. “See, Terrence, it has stars and an Ocelot print.” “Whoaaaa…”
Fallon also ribbed Howard about his Oscars presenting “flub,” of which Howard said:
“I’m like, I’m at the Academy Awards, I got Meryl Streep, you got the best actors in the world, and they up there reading the teleprompter. Doing 1920 impersonations of reading the teleprompter. I was like, man, I could memorize this! I’m clowning. I’m telling my wife, just wait until I go up there, I could do better than this, I could do better than this.
And so I walk out there, and uh… first and foremost, I forgot to wear a belt that day.
And I got this all worked out, I’ve worked 18 hours to get this memorized, I’m about to kill it! And I get out there. …And there’s Oprah. Hi, Oprah.”
Long story short, it sounds like he got distracted by the pretty people and forgot his lines. Which was beautiful to watch, because he went from “intense gravitas to the point of parody,” to “oops I forgot my lines,” to loudly bumping his mic stand like a nervous nerd at the sixth grade spelling bee all in the space of a few minutes. Flub schmub, I would pay to watch a version of the Oscars where Terrence Howard presented all the awards.
Also, this new Terrence Howard is charming, but I miss the old Spaceman, Music-Is-My-Go-Cart Terrence Howard. It’s like he channeled all his eccentricities into that scarf. I wonder if you took off that scarf if he’d bust out the bongo drums and rainsticks and start talking about how music is his favorite color and reality is just a soup dumpling again.