Steven Seagal arrived in Australia this week, to promote his speaking tour, An Evening With Steven Seagal — reportedly set up by the same guy who promoted speaking tours by Charlie Sheen and Arnold Schwarzenegger — the tickets for which reportedly ranged from $69 (nice) to $999. Quite a bargain to hear an addled man in an acre-sized kimono mumble about On Deadly Ground, if you ask me.
The weirdness began almost immediately when Seagal — who in late 2017 published The Way Of The Shadow Wolves: The Deep State And The Hijacking Of America, with the foreword written by Sheriff Joe Arpaio — did an interview with the radio station Triple M, in which he showed up with a gigantic bodyguard and refused to hold his own microphone.
Per news.com.au:
Lawrence Mooney and Jess Eva from Triple M’s Moonman In The Morning show described their interview with the action star as “scary” and “odd”.
“We had 15 minutes with him. It was odd from the get-go,” Mooney said on air this morning.
“He was dressed in a Japanese kimono top, jeans, and there was a massive bodyguard there, a huge man.
“We went to hand him a microphone very early on and he goes, ‘I’m not holding that’.’”
Eva, added: “He did, he refused to hold a microphone!”
“I was frightened, it was scary,” Mooney said on Triple M.
This was after Seagal’s handler reportedly declared questions about Seagal’s prolific history of sexual assault allegations off limits. No word on whether the huge kimono was of the bullet proof variety, as Seagal has been rumored to wear.
In another interview, with Australia’s Daily Telegraph, Seagal apparently brought in a Russian woman whose job it was to scratch Seagal’s back where he couldn’t reach.
The Daily Telegraph’s Jonathan Moran also interviewed Seagal yesterday and described it as one of the “strangest” interviews he’s done during his 20-year career.
“Moments into the interview, he signalled a young Russian woman to scratch his right shoulder in a spot he clearly couldn’t reach,” Moran wrote. “She appeared to be a masseuse and there was a smell of Deep Heat, as if his shoulder was a trouble area.”
Unclear what this woman’s exact job is, but Seagal has been described as having a large entourage with very specific jobs, including “one man whose job seemed to be to carry a bag of sunglasses for him.”
Seagal also had time to squeeze in an interview about MMA with Submission Radio, in which he defended the recently-suspended Khabib Nurmogomedov for Nurmogomedov’s part in the post-fight brawl with Conor McGregor, apparently doing so in his official capacity as a diplomat:
“Do I condemn [Khabib] for what he did after the fight? No. Even as a diplomat I will say no. If you badmouth someone’s family, their wife, their children, their mother, their father, their country, their religion, all bets are off, and I would have done the same thing.”
I’ll leave it to the bureaucracy experts to decide if Seagal’s ceremonial position as Russia’s special envoy to the United States qualifies him as “a diplomat,” though he has long claimed ties to the CIA.
An Evening With Steven Seagal debuts Friday night in Sydney and the Platinum Package includes signed memorabilia, an “exclusive event lanyard,” and “the chance to bid” on even more unique memorabilia. We eagerly await the first reviews.
