April Fools: Our Favorite Crazy Celebrity Pranks

Thandiwe Newton grosses out Simon Pegg 

On the set of 2007’s Run Fatboy Run, Thandiwe Newton smooshed a Mars bar and placed it in the toilet of costar Simon Pegg’s trailer “with a little apple juice around the edge for authenticity. ... It was a prank and a snack all in one,” Newton gloated.

Flirty pranks on the set of ‘Game of Thrones’ 

Rose Leslie (Ygritte on Game of Thrones) must have loved her costar Kit Harington (who played Ygritte’s sweetie Jon Snow): Harington put a model of Jon Snow’s beheaded head in her refrigerator, and filmed her shrieking reaction when she opened the fridge and saw it on April Fool’s Day. And she married him anyway!

Schwarzenegger pranks his fans (for a good cause)

In 2015, Arnold Schwarzenegger pretended to be the wax replica of his Terminator character at Madame Tussauds Hollywood. “You look real,” one fan said. “That’s because I am,” he replied, making the fan scream. The jape was a stunt to raise awareness of the charity After-School All-Stars, which provides after-school activities for more than 90,000 low-income children.

Woody Harrelson (left) and Sean Penn on the set of "The Thin Red Line."

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Woody Harrelson wins a prank war with Sean Penn 

While filming the ultra-serious 1998 WWII movie The Thin Red Line, Sean Penn and Woody Harrelson had a prank battle going on. Harrelson filled Penn’s helmet with chewed gum and had costar Nick Nolte phone Penn asking to bail him out of jail. Penn arrived to find Nolte in handcuffs, and a menacing guard with a gun. The “guard” was Harrelson.

Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin rat-prank each other

When Dean Martin refused to stay up one night carousing with Frank Sinatra (Martin had an early tee time the next morning), Sinatra replaced Martin’s golf balls with ping pong balls. “To repay Frank,” wrote their friend Tony Oppedisano in his memoir Sinatra and Me: In the Wee Small Hours, “Dean paid one of the maids in the hotel to replace the shampoo with honey in the bottle in Frank’s room.”

​King of the Hollywood prank: George Clooney

Of Clooney’s innumerable practical jokes — sending Meryl Streep condescending dialect advice allegedly from Brad Pitt; cheating Ocean’s Eleven producer Jerry Weintraub in a drinking contest by putting water in his own glass and vodka in Weintraub’s, so that Weintraub fell asleep and Clooney and Pitt could fill his underwear with M&Ms — perhaps the cleverest was the trick he pulled on The Monuments Men costar Matt Damon. “He took in my wardrobe by an eighth of an inch, every other day,” Damon said. “He had the wardrobe department do that because he knew that I was trying to lose weight … every time I came back my pants were tighter, and I was like, ‘Ugh, this is weird. I’ve been going to the gym!’ ”

Paul Newman visits Masada, in Israel, while filming the movie "Exodus" in 1959.

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The first king of the Hollywood prank: Paul Newman

The list of Paul Newman’s Hollywood pranks matches — or perhaps surpasses — Clooney’s. He tossed a Paul Newman lookalike dummy to its apparent death while filming The MacKintosh Man, freaking out director John Huston, and pulled the same stunt on notoriously humorless Exodus director Otto Preminger, who was so shocked he required first aid. Newman sent a goat wearing a note to his Buffalo Bill and the Indians director Robert Altman: The note read, “Dear Bob, Since what [wine] you serve at dinner is goat piss you may as well have a goat handy.”

Newman also had toilet paper made with the slogan “Greetings from Robert Redford” and Redford’s picture, and delivered a crushed sports car to Redford’s driveway. While filming The Sting, he had director George Roy Hill’s desk sawn in half. Then Hill found his car sawn in half too. And when John Malkovich appeared late for rehearsals on The Glass Menagerie, Newman had someone break into his apartment and fill it with alarm clocks.

Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation."

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Tom Cruise gets his costar uncomfortably hot

While filming Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation in impossibly hot Morocco, Tom Cruise turned on costar Simon Pegg’s BMW seat warmer when he wasn’t looking. When Cruise wasn’t looking, Pegg one-upped the star by putting black tape over Cruise’s seat warmer light and turned it up to high.