If you follow Hollywood closely enough, there are few stories that will truly shock you. Wesley Snipes tried to strangle the director of Blade: Trinity because of a T-shirt that an extra brought to set? I mean, that doesn’t not sound like Wesley Snipes. Matthew McConaughey has a secret YouTube account? Hell yeah he does. Leonardo DiCaprio ate raw bison liver while filming The Revenant? Well, the man wanted an Oscar!
Still, there wasn’t anything to quite prepare me for what I read on Tuesday night. This assemblage of words is 100 percent true, and I can’t stop thinking about it: John Travolta is starring in Moose, a stalker thriller directed by Fred Durst.
What is Moose, you ask? Beyond being a film helmed by the frontman of Limp Bizkit for which principal photography has begun in Alabama, according to Variety, it is the name of Travolta’s titular character, who is a “rabid movie fan” obsessed with an action star, played by Devon Sawa. If you haven’t watched Final Destination, you might recognize Sawa as the human child form of Casper in 1995’s Casper.
Moose’s fixation with this movie star “turns from stalking to ambition of destroying the star’s life,” per Variety. But that’s not even the weirdest part; Moose is reportedly inspired by Durst’s real-life experiences with a stalker, which sound rather horrifying.
Check out these Moose set photos in The Daily Mail from February, which paint a terrifying picture of this stalker. Travolta is sporting a messy gray mullet and wearing what appears to be a marching-band outfit from the 1980s. Either Moose is trying to blend in—on, say, a movie set?—and get closer to the action star at the heart of his obsession, or he just wears marching-band clothes on the regular. Either scenario is perpetual nightmare fuel.
After Travolta’s prestige turn in the first season of American Crime Story, I must admit that I didn’t see “stalker with a mullet following Casper the friendly action star” showing up on his résumé, but I’m extremely here for it. After Battlefield Earth, we should be prepared for anything from the actor—even a collaboration with the headman of a band that had a best-selling album named Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water.
And “Fred Durst, movie director” has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? It’s not the first time he’s directed something—no, I’m not talking about the sex tape, or the time he emerged from a 13-foot porcelain toilet bowl at Ozzfest in 1998, which was pure cinema. Durst has actually directed two feature films before, and they both sound … wholesome?
First, there was 2007’s The Education of Charlie Banks, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Ritter, and Sebastian Stan, which the Toronto Star called “an earnest, if romanticized, examination of the American class system in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the eternally confounding politics of acceptance and exclusion.” (This feels on brand. The lyrics to “Nookie” open with “I came into this world as a reject.”) Two of these actors are now stars in superhero cinematic universes, and they have ties to Limp Bizkit. This is clearly not a coincidence.
Next up was 2008’s The Longshots, starring Ice Cube, which was based on the true story of Jasmine Plummer, the first girl to play Pop Warner football. This came out during Ice Cube’s Are We There Yet? days, a.k.a. the greatest professional stretch of his career. Even Entertainment Weekly wrote the most shocking part of the movie was that Durst directed it, “and he doesn’t do half bad.” Don’t you dare question Fred Durst, unless he’s referring to Vladimir Putin as a “great guy with clear moral principles.”
Moose sounds like a different beast altogether, but apparently Durst has range, and his non-Bizkit portfolio is worth getting hyped about. If you thought Kobe Bryant winning an Oscar was weird, just wait until Moose and the Bizkettes take over awards season. Yeah!
