Food Network star and hair bleach aficionado Guy Fieri has rubbed elbows with some major stars. In an interview on a show called In Depth with Graham Bensinger, Fieri revealed that one such encounter with Hollywood royalty led to a funny case of mistaken identity.
Back in 2020, Fieri was in LA shooting one of his many shows for the Food Network when he got a call from sports talking head Jay Glazer. There was a big Pay-Per-View fight going down the next day. Jay was going to watch it at Sylvester Stallone’s house, and Stallone extended an invite to Fieri.
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He was a little hesitant at first—Stallone is a huge star, after all, and getting an invite to such an event could be a little nerve-racking. But his wife talked him into it. Fieri agreed to go, but he had one condition: He would only go if he got to cook for Sly and his guests.
Sly told him he didn’t have to do that; he was just going to order some sandwiches. Is going to be a chill vibe. No need to work. But Fieri insisted. Stallone relented.
Fieri arrived at Sly’s house and started wandering around, soaking in the sights. He is in the home of one of the biggest movie stars in cinema history. He probably couldn’t believe he was there. He was standing around in Stallone’s cigar room, where there was a bar, when a woman approached him and told him to take off his denim jacket and get to work. She moved on, assuming Guy would start slinging drinks to Stallone and his friends.
He didn’t think twice about it until later in the evening when he was in the kitchen prepping a meal. The woman came up to him again and apologized for not knowing who he was. Perfectly understandable, though. If you see a guy with spiky bleach blonde hair, a goatee, earrings, wraparound sunglasses, and a denim jacket, hanging around the bar at an event, it’s natural to assume that person is the bartender rather than a celebrity guest.
But all wound up paying off pretty big for Fieri. He got to meet Sugar Ray Leonard and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The biggest moment was one that Stallone captured on footage for his social media followers. As Fieri was cooking up a storm in the kitchen, Stallone dragged in another Hollywood legend: Al Pacino. In the interview, Fieri said that he normally doesn’t get starstruck, but Al Pacino did the trick.
Pacino took a few bites of a pasta dish Fieri had been working on. When Fieri asked him what he thought of the dish, Pacino tossed down the fork, pushed himself back away from the table, and delivered what Fieri described as a sound reminiscent of the “woo yah” Pacino shouted every few minutes In Scent Of A Woman, the role for which he won his only Oscar. OK, that’s pretty good.