Famous people tend to get away with things normal folks can’t. If you were to simply turn up on the doorstep of your favourite video game developer, knock on the door and ask to come in, your chances of getting past the receptionist would be slim to none. But if you’re Jon Heder, the guy who played Napoleon Dynamite? You might have a shot.
This morning we had the chance to catch up Bungie’s Head of Art, Dave Dunn. We’ll have a more in-depth interview up later, but he told us a story that was justtoo good not to share…
“Some odd things that happened to us post Halo, after that success,” he told us. “Halo was just this pop culture lightning bolt that we couldn’t predict. It led to random… sometimes they were PR events that Microsoft would organise — but sometimes random celebrities would just show up out of the blue.
“The strangest one I heard about was — and I don’t know how he got there, or how he knew where to find us — but one of our employees was out front on a smoke break and then he came back up.
“He just said, ‘uh, Napoleon Dynamite is downstairs can I bring him in?’
“The actor, Jon Heder, just turned up at our office and got an impromptu tour. Then he was like okay, thanks! Good bye!”
He also brought someone else along for the ride.
“It was him and his brother. Not Kip — not the brother from the movie! His real brother!”
I love that Jon Heder just randomly, without a single word of warning, decided to show up at Bungie HQ and ask for a studio tour. Amazing. Maybe I should dress up as Simon Pegg and go on tour…