Machine Gun Kelly didn’t have to look far to find the inspiration for his new stoner comedy Good Mourning. On Thursday night’s (May 26) Tonight Show, the rapper-turned-rocker-and-actor explained that the origin of the flick out now came when fiancé Megan Fox sent him a long text that began, “A raven came and sat next to me in a tree.” That intriguing snapshot was followed by a long string of other ideas Kelly said Fox dropped on him before hopping a plane to Europe while leaving her phone behind.
“I was like, ‘What is that?! You can’t leave me with this!’” he recalled saying at the time. The cryptic message dropped just as they were getting serious, so Kelly took it to his friends to ask for relationship advice and they told him, “That’s not good, dude.” Now that he’s promoting the film he co-wrote, co-directed and stars in, he said he’s begun wondering why he got so manic that he wrote a whole movie and spent a bunch of money instead of waiting a week to ask Megan what she was thinking.
And, in one of those stories only a first-time movie director can tell, MGK also admitted that he was so “super meticulous” that he spent $50,000 on an intricate shot that involved giving a puppet lobster abs and making its mouth move. The ridiculous 15-minute scene also involved puppeteers who made an electric eel appear to speak. But you won’t see it because test audiences just kind of yawned at the bit.
“We thought it was so funny,” he said. “We were like, ‘Oh, this lobster section is going to crush.’ And it did the opposite… The only note pretty much for the whole screening was like, ‘Great! Laughed my ass off. Why was there this lobster scene that was 15 minutes? I hated it.’”
The How High-style movie also features Snoop Dogg, comedian Whitney Cummings, Zach Villa, Jenna Boyd, Avril Lavigne, Dennis Rodman, Tom Arnold, Trippie Redd, Danny Trejo, Dove Cameron and Colson’s bestie, Pete Davidson.
And, because this is what his life is like now, MGK also described the time Davidson showed up one Easter with two 40 oz. beers ready to party, only to end up at Kelly pal Sandra Bullock’s house, where they ran into Jennifer Aniston and other major stars. “Pete was like, ‘why would you do this to me? We look so stupid!… Why didn’t you tell me this is where we were going?’” So, to get him back, last month for MGK’s birthday party, Davidson asked if he could bring a +1 to the house and he showed up with The Batman himself: Robert Pattinson.
And I was like, “‘You brought Batman?’” he laughed. “Everyone kept coming up and was like, ‘Dude, is Batman at your birthday party?’”
Machine Gun also talked about his upcoming first arena headlining tour in support of his No. 1 album Mainstream Sellout, warning fans not to expect all the big LED screens and bells and whistles that normally accompany such an outing. “We scratched all that. We’re like, ‘a good showman just needs a show,’” he said. To prove his no-flash-needed bona fides, when Fallon read a recent quote from Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger in which the rock legend praised MGK (and Yungblud) for bringing a electric energy back to the genre, Kelly revealed that he heard that great news on what was an otherwise bad day.
“It was a day… I’m polarizing to some people, so there was a lot of… like, you can just feel a lot of hate coming at you sometimes and I just remember I was feeling it that morning and then I read that quote and then I jus said, ‘I didn’t say it,’” he recalled, raising his eyebrows and taking a satisfied sip from his mug before doing a bit of Mick rooster walk pantomime.
MGK also returned for a round of “Mad Lib Theater” that seriously tested his 4th grade grammar skills.
Watch MGK on The Tonight Show below.
