“American Psycho” author Bret Easton Ellis is not one to hold back from airing his often-controversial thoughts — over the years, he’s cultivated the personae of an expert rabble-rouser. Here are seven people (and two TV shows) he’s unleashed his wordy wrath upon.
Barbra Streisand
Ellis tore into the icon for saying she’s gained weight after Trump’s election. “Really?,” he said on his podcast. “You’re blaming the president for your own problems and neuroses?”
Lena Dunham
He attacked the “Girls” star for that same reason on the podcast. Dunham famously declared she’s lost weight because of the president.
Meryl Streep
On that same podcast, Ellis criticized the Oscar winner for bashing Trump during her Golden Globes speech instead of “talking about all the filmmakers she had worked with and who had passed away in the last two years.” What most irked Ellis: Streep not using her speech as an opportunity to eulogize her friend Carrie Fisher, who had just passed away.
David Foster Wallace
In his review of the David Foster Wallace biopic “The End of the Tour,” Ellis didn’t just go against the grain to trash James Ponsolt’s well-received film (he called it “reverential to a fault”), but used most of his critique to slag his formal rival, who’s since passed. In his review, he calls Wallace’s novel “Infinite Jest” “bloated and minor-key condescending.” Wallace once laid into Ellis in an interview with Larry McCaffrey, saying “American Pyscho” is “no more” than “a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems.”
Nikki Finke
As everyone in Hollywood knows, ex-Deadline editor Nikki Finke is a very private person. Her staff famously rarely saw her while working under her, and it’s hard to even find a photo of Finke online. Enter Ellis, who made her personal life very public when he took to Twitter to reveal that he lived in the same West Hollywood building as the industry vet. When Finke allegedly reported her displeasure to the building’s staff and management, Ellis returned to Twitter to blast her: “None of them know who the f–k she is,” he wrote.
Roger Rosenblatt
In his New York Times book review of “American Psycho,” critic Roger Rosenblatt urged readers to “snuff this book!” Asked to respond to the review by Rolling Stone, Ellis said the writer “made a complete ass of himself.” “I remember Sonny Mehta reading parts of it over the phone to me and I was laughing hysterically,” he said. “I mean, really — complaining about the grammar in a book that’s narrated by a madman is not only foolish, but it’s irresponsible.”
“Modern Family”
“Modern Family,” which features an openly gay couple as lead characters, was for years also a reliable Emmy winning critical favorite. That didn’t stop Ellis from slamming the sitcom on Twitter: “If you think Modern Family has a progressive attitude about gayness then you’re a retrograde tool. The fact that it’s being lauded: a joke.”
Matt Bomer
Ellis reduced the “Magic Mike” hunk to that guy from “Modern Family,” in tweeting about the rumor going around in 2012 that Bomer was close to being cast as Christian Grey in “Fifty Shades of Grey.” “Casting Matt Bomer is the equivalent as casting Jesse Tyler Ferguson…,” he tweeted.
“Glee”
Ryan Murphy is probably not a fan of Ellis following the author’s incendiary tweet about the now defunct teen show. “I like the idea of Glee but why is it that every time I watch an episode I feel like I’ve stepped into a puddle of HIV?” Ellis followed that up with another tweet five hours later defending his comment: ‘No, I wasn’t drunk last night. I was watching Chris Colfer singing, um, Le Jazz Hot and felt like I had suddenly come down with the hivs.”
