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The Unexpected Favorite Films of Your Favorite Celebrities

The TV shows and movies you watch say a lot about who you are as a person.

The TV shows and movies you watch say a lot about who you are as a person. If your significant other, for instance, told you that he or she had seen Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1994 classic True Lies more than any other movie you might think about him or her in a different way. Whether you consider that information to be a positive or a negative mark on your beloved's character would depend on your own taste in cinema. The thing that drives us to identify with a particular type of organized action and dialogue contains some secret strain of our identity, a key that might in some way unlock an understanding of persona at least a little wider.

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Below, based on my research, are some of your favorite celebrities' favorite films.* The results might surprise you.

Matt Damon – Forrest Gump (Zemeckis, 1994)

Matt Damon has watched Forrest Gump in its entirety more than 400 times, though never once in the presence of other people, due to the spasms of uncontrollable weeping that overcome him throughout the film. It is a body-shaking weeping, one that actually hinders Damon's ability to watch the film. "I weep," he was once surprised to find himself writing in his private bedtime journal, "because I realize I have missed my call. I have come to know through my relationship with God that I alone was placed on earth to perform the role of Forrest, and by instead having ceded that responsibility to Thomas fucking Hanks, I have misplaced the majesty of my existence, left to endure a mockery of all that I am as an actor, and a man." In recent years, Damon has found relief only in his ongoing attempts to pen more than a dozen scripts for sequels to the franchise, including Forrest Saves Thanksgiving and Forrest Visits the Alamo. The only thing keeping these creations from Hollywood actuality is Damon's iron-clad resolution to only sell the script if he is allowed to finally star in his fated role.

Derrick Rose – The Crow (Proyas, 1994)

Unless The Crow is playing in the background, Derrick Rose can't sleep. He first encountered it randomly on the screen over the treadmill early on in the rehabilitation process after his 2012 knee injury and became so obsessed with it often whole days would pass while he watched the film on loop, including on his iPhone while driving, at team meetings, while having sex. In his 2013 tax return, he listed his occupation as "Eric Draven AKA Yr Boy The Crow," and that same year spent more than 15 million dollars redecorating the interior of his home to match various sets found in the film. In his sleep, he has been known to recite the film's entire dialogue, including a range of dramatic voices startlingly similar to the actual actors'. A tattoo covering the majority of his lower back features the complete lyrics to the opening song on the film's soundtrack, "Burn" by the Cure.

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Barack Obama – Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pasolini, 1975)

A little-known feature of Obama's presidency is his requirement that every cabinet member attend a yearly screening of Pasolini's notorious masterpiece of sexual depravity and violence, Salò, in the State Dining Room of the White House, on Christmas Eve. Staff members are assigned roles that they must act out alongside the screen in the manner of Rocky Horror, though Obama himself does not take part, watching the performance from behind a buffet table upon which must be placed one of each kind of currently available specialty pizza from Papa John's. Last year, it is rumored, John Kerry got so turnt while delivering his sadomasochistic performance as the polyamorous, coprophagic, maniacally abusive character, "The Magistrate," that he experienced an epileptic seizure and had to be hospitalized for 18 days. On official record, when last asked, Obama has stated his favorite film is the Guns N' Roses live concert film, Appetite for Democracy 3D.

Mark Zuckerberg – Titanic (Cameron, 1997)

Lots of people have tried out the trick where you synch up The Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon, but Mark Zuckerberg might be the only person who's linked together Mark's favorite movie, Titanic, with Mark's favorite album, Global Warming by Pitbull. It's really eerie how interlocked these two pieces of artwork are, almost as if they were made to go together.

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Rafael Nadal – Spider-Man 3 (Raimi, 2007)

The only movie Nadal has ever seen is Spider-Man 3, which he loved, and now refers to in conversation generally as "movies."

Trent Reznor – You've Got Mail (Ephron, 1998)

"I used to throw these parties where all my rich friends would come over and watch a series of bootleg videos of obese men taking turns binge eating raw meat and puking and shitting on teenage Asian girls for cash, but this Meg Ryan online dating joint is so much more truly dark as fuck."

Sarah Palin – Scarface (De Palma, 1983)

In the secret panic room she has had installed under the west wing of her family's mansion, Sarah Palin sneaks away each night long after all the others have gone to bed, to play online poker and smoke weed while watching her favorite classic gangster shit. "Fuck Gaspar Gomez and fuck the fucking Diaz Brothers!" she screams along with the TV, laying nude in a pile of what appears to be cocaine, but is actually horse dander, which she compulsively hoards to play pretend with. "As long as it's pretend, it's not a sin," she tells her reflection in the mirror she divides the dander into lines on, sometimes snorting a bump just to remember how it feels. Palin owns more than 1,400 copies of Scarface on Blu-ray for no good reason other than she likes to show her support for the Amazon Corporation. After every sentence that comes out of her mouth during her speeches and interviews, inside her head she's adding "mane" to the end of it.

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Scarface – The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Bunuel, 1972)

Scarface's original stage name was Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, borrowed from the French title of the 1972 Bunuel film. In 1992, he switched to Scarface after realizing The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisieis actually boring as shit.

Kim Kardashian – Ichi the Killer (Miike, 2001)

"Rain blood. Rain blood around us. Watch the sunrise from inside a pile of blood. Worship the blood with all our bodies as the moon dies and the skies melt and the flood of blood is all that remains of what had once been. Hail Satan, hallelujah, Namaste, and amen."

*The research I did was none, and I would be very surprised if any of the people listed above would cite these films as their favorites or say or do any of the things I made up above.

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