Corey Feldman makes his own phone calls. “I am doing excellent,” he tells me, conveying undeniable excitement from the start. “Much going on. Much positive stuff. I’m almost overwhelmed with positive energy and love,” he continues, his patent raspy voice giving way to a warm laugh. “I feel like I’m in the realm. I’m in the zone. I’m here. I’m doing it.”
The “realm” is definitely—defiantly—undeniably his own. An actor since childhood, in recent years he’s focused on his music, as well as a continued cause-driven quest for truth, including his much-publicized allegations regarding sexual abuse in Hollywood, particularly predators who target children.
More from Spin:
- Ms. Lauryn Hill, The Fugees Announce ‘Miseducation’ Summer 2024 Tour
- Rui Gabriel’s Wise Yet Innocent Debut, ‘Compassion’
- Phantogram Unveils the ‘Mystery’ of Their Newest Single
You don’t live a life like this without taking a lot of hits—no doubt he’s had his share.
“At the end of the day, I don’t think you survive 50 years in an industry if you’re not ready to show your intestines to the world and say, ‘This is who I am,’” he says. “You have to be that real and that raw and that honest in all of your dealings, so that people can always go back and look at whatever quote from whatever part of history when they try to nail you down and say, ‘Oh, but you said this back in 1935.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, well, I’m still saying the same thing today because I don’t lie.’ I do change my opinions from time to time. Give me that space and we’re okay.”
His 2013 memoir chronicles an extraordinary life of film and famous friends (including best friend Corey Haim, who died in 2010), marked consistently by all measures of heartbreak. Artistically, in a career that spans five decades, he’s never fit into a box, and perhaps this is what makes him such a polarizing artist. The Lost Boys, The Goonies, Stand by Me—just a few of the most iconic films of the ‘80s, and all time, and Corey starred in them.
This summer, after a 20-year wait, ironically some time around Corey’s mid-July birthday, the horror-comedy film The Birthday will finally be widely released, after a limited run in 2006 abroad. Corey characterizes The Birthday, directed by Eugenio Mira, as one of those “weird cult movies.”
“It was during a time [20 years ago] where, let’s face it, most of the industry had turned their backs on me. Corey Feldman was not a cool topic. It was not something that you talked about other than in a joking manner on a late-night talk show,” he says. “Not only did I not lose my acting chops when I got older, but I actually got better with time.”
As if a new film wasn’t enough, last week he released a new single, “The Joke,” complete with jack-in-the-box-themed artwork featuring Corey in clown costume. As he explains, the joke itself refers to “the crap-talkers, the trolls…the bots. The people that come after me, to try to diminish my work. It’s got a real message behind it, which is that we must stay true to ourselves.” Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst directed the music video, a prelude to their upcoming summer tour, which kicks off on July 16, Corey’s 53rd birthday. It’s called the Loserville Tour—but, according to Corey, you might be pronouncing it all wrong.
“It’s named Lo Serve Ill because we’re going to hit them with a low serve, which is what they don’t expect. Everybody expects the high serve, but they’re getting the low serve and it’s going to be ill.”
And then he says: “No, I’m just playing. It’s a throwback. [Fred] explained it to me as…we’re a group of misfits and it’s kind of like The Goonies… The misfits, the underdogs, the one that everybody pointed the finger at and said that they sucked—well, that’s all of us.” Regardless, the tour kicks off at Wisconsin’s Somerset Amphitheater, where Corey’s promising his most epic birthday party to date.
So “new” movie, new music, a tour that launches on his birthday, and we haven’t even touched on Corey’s epic performance of Run DMC’s “It’s Tricky” on The Masked Singer, which he called his “highlight.” So, what’s left?
“I’m telling you, I’m still considering running for president one day,” he drops, rather casually.
No doubt about it, there’s only one Corey Feldman.
What pushed The Birthday to be released now, 20 years after it was made?
Corey Feldman: Basically, I was sitting at home one day working on my album, and somebody sends me a clip from [a late-night talk show]. It’s Jordan Peele being interviewed, and he’s talking about me, and he’s saying how there’s these little nods to me in each of his films…and how he sees me as some form of muse for his work. I was like, “What? Where is this coming from?” One day [in 2022] I get an invitation to attend a movie called Nope, and I’m like, “What is this? Oh, it’s a Jordan Peele film.”
I went down and I checked it out. [Jordan Peele is] standing there with a mask on, and I approached him and said, “Hey, thank you for the invitation.”
He is like, “Oh, Corey. Oh my God.” He’s like, “Can I get a picture with you?” I’m like, “Sure.” He is like, “Do you mind if I take the mask off?” I’m like, “No, no, it’s your premiere, man. Of course, you could.”
I sent him a text and we started bantering, and that conversation went on for a few days. He said, “So what are you up to these days film-wise?” I said, “Well, I’m taking a hiatus or maybe even retiring from film. I don’t know that I really care about playing the game anymore, to be honest.” He says, “Well, do you miss it? Have any regrets?” I said, “Well, there’s only one regret, which is that my greatest movie ever never made it to the theaters. It’s called The Birthday.”
He said, “Well, how do I see it?” I said, “Well, you can’t. It’s never been released in the United States at all. I do have a copy, but the only way you’d be able to see that copy is if you came over to my house for a screening, because I can’t let it out.” He said, “Okay, well, then let’s do that.”
He said to me at the end of the film, “Corey, this film is a cinematic masterpiece, and your work is so amazing and compelling that the world needs to see this film. You have to let this film get released.”
I said, “It’s not up to me, it’s been sitting on a shelf for 18 years, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.” He said, “Well, let me think about that.”
He said, “This is going to be your year. I promise you, I know these things. The whole world is going to change, and it’s going in your direction, and you’re going to start to realize this very soon.” I was like, “Okay, buddy, whatever you say. I’m just humbly trying to get my album finished, and that’s about it.”
About two months later, I get a text: “Hey, I’ve got this film festival that I’m going to do [in New York]. We would love for you to come down and be a part of it. We’re going to show four or five of your films as part of this film series to show how your films inspired my films.”
We put The Birthday up on the projection reel, dusted it off, and played that old print, and it sold out two screenings back to back. The crazy thing is, they showed Stand by Me, they showed Dream a Little Dream, they showed some great film work that I did as a kid—those movies were full, but they weren’t sold out. As a result, a bunch of different distributors came down because they heard about it and we started getting offers.
Isn’t that a great story?
You’re a polarizing artist.
You have no idea how many people write to me and say, “Your music saved my life because your words are so important to me. They gave me inspiration, they gave me hope, they gave me something to hang on to when I felt like all hope was lost,” or, “I use it to motivate me to go to the gym,” or, “I use it to motivate me to go dancing, or to go running, or jogging,” or whatever.
I’ve heard so many different things from people about what my music means to them, and then there’s completely the opposite side of the spectrum. “Oh, are you kidding? It’s so awful. Only he doesn’t know how bad it is.” You go, okay, if that’s really how you feel, then I have to laugh at you. Because if you’re that desensitized, and you truly believe that, then you’re the one that’s disassociated with the world, not me.
I know exactly where my fanbase is, and where the hearts and minds of the people who come up to me and hug me and cry on my shoulders. You can never take that away from me.
You said people have compared you to performance art, as though it was a negative, but I don’t think that would have to be a bad thing at all…
Look, here’s the thing: When we did the Today show, we made history. You can denounce it, you can say it was terrible, you can say whatever you want to say, because they said it all, but…they said on the Today show it was the [year’s] most viewed performance on todayshow.com.
The whole purpose was to put a nail in the coffin of my music career. That was the intention of the media. The moment I walked off that stage, and I’m talking within three minutes of me walking off the stage. The first thing I got was a text from somebody in the industry who said, “Congratulations, you killed it. What an incredible job.”
The very next thing I saw was a headline scrolling across my phone, “Corey Feldman’s bizarre performance on Today show. What was he thinking?” “Corey Feldman’s weird performance on the Today show.” “Corey Feldman’s creepy performance on the Today show.” Every single headline was the exact same with a one-word difference—every story could have been a carbon copy. They all came out within five minutes of each other. How does that happen if this isn’t pre-coordinated?
Basically, if you remember, that was the dawn of the Me Too Movement. [There was about to be] a big story about abuse in Hollywood. Ronan Farrow called me up and said, “We almost met. I don’t know if you remember this, but I was supposed to interview you as soon as you walked out from performing on the Today show.” I said, “What are you talking about? No, you weren’t.” He said, “Yes, I was.”
He was like, “No, I promise you. It was all set up with the producers. I was waiting in the sidelines to interview you, and then they pulled the piece at the last minute.”
I said to Ronan, “That never was going to happen—you would have had to clear that with my publicist.” He’s like, “They did.”
My publicist was sitting right there with me, and she’s shaking her head: “No, I had never got that call.” I’m like, “She’s sitting right here, Ronan, and said she never got that call.” He’s like, “Oh, wow.”
Basically, they were planning to ambush me to talk about something that would have been very uncomfortable right after a performance. Because that [ambush] didn’t happen, they wanted to give themselves an excuse for having me on. I think the way that they found that was by bashing my performance and making it look like it was all a joke.
That’s just a theory. I could be totally wrong.
Is that all on the record?
It is now.
You always get back up. How?
It’s scary at times. It’s dark. It’s lonely. It’s frightening. At the end of the day, I have a very deep connection with my higher power who I choose to call God. I feel that I’ve been put here on this Earth for a reason. Not just to entertain people. That’s the secondary reason. That’s the reason that gets people’s attention. I believe that I’ve been put here to help spread certain words of prophecy, whether it’s about speaking truth to power, or not letting people get away with telling certain lies, or making people aware of situations so that they can better themselves.
Based on pain that I’ve experienced or mistakes I’ve made, because I’m a public figure, I can say, “Please don’t do this. Don’t go down this road because you’re going to find yourself in a world of hurt. Look at my life, you can see how making this mistake ruined this for me, or you can see how making this mistake has taken this opportunity away from me. Don’t let that happen to you.”
If anything, I serve as a warning for everybody. Hopefully, at the end of it all, I can also serve as inspiration that if you figure things out, it’s never too late to start over, and it’s never too late to correct the course and fix your life and become a better, happier person.
Are you ever afraid?
Every day. I don’t leave my house in a public setting without armed security. That’s an expensive place to live. That means I got to always be working at double speed because not only do I have to support my family and my multiple divorces [Laughs], but I also have to keep my household going. I house my bandmates because they work for me, and so I let them live here free of charge. I help anybody that I can. That’s my motto in life. If I’ve got something to offer that somebody else doesn’t have, then I do my best to try and share with them, or make their life better if I can, as long as they treat me with love and respect. Obviously, if somebody is treating me like crap, I don’t want to help them. The point being, doing so puts a target on your back in many ways.
People have infiltrated my life on many levels, from spies being sent into my home to place cameras, to place recording devices. I’ve had to hire private investigators. We’ve had to use bugging sensor devices where you can scan the room and detect a microphone in the room or a camera in the room, and we’ve found stuff.
It sucks to not be able to just jump in the car and run down the street if I want to. That’s the way it is now because you don’t know. There’s people out there that certainly don’t want me alive because they want to punish me for what I’ve done. Even though all I did was tell people the truth about what happened to me and my friends and say, “Please, don’t let this happen again.” I didn’t even try to have anybody thrown in jail. It’s not like I was going after somebody to ruin their life.
All I was trying to do is get the truth out, and hope that they got some kind of poetic justice or karma for the bad deed that they’ve done. I’ve never sued anybody. I’m just a messenger. Hopefully, they don’t shoot the messenger, as we say.
You are an example of someone being very early, really paving a way for other people to tell their truth.
Thank God that’s starting to happen with the Nickelodeon movie [Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV]. I can’t believe they even let that through. After the resistance I got and the way that they hijacked my movie. I don’t know if you know what happened, but I spent $1.3 million making a documentary to tell the truth because everybody begged me to.
I tried to raise money to do a feature film on my book, which was going to be $10 million. I was trying to raise $10 million to make it into a theatrical feature film. It would’ve been a great film. I was going to direct it. I was going to use big set pieces, and it was going to be just beautiful. I found a way to do it. It was going to look like 100 million, but I found a way to do it for 10 million. We started raising money to that end, and then all of a sudden there was backlash and people trying to shut me down, and saying that I was lying and all this stuff.
It painted me into a corner where I eventually had to just come up with my own money and do a documentary on a much smaller scale to get the true facts of the story out. Because every other attempt I made, from writing a book to making a Lifetime movie to whatever, they kept editing it, they kept changing it. They kept protecting the people that we were trying to name and changing their names.
I was like, “The only way I can really get this out is to put my own neck on the line, to put my own money on the line.” I went and met with all these distributors that were saying, “Oh, we want to support you, we want to support you”, but nobody would make a deal. Everybody would say, “Oh, well, we can’t do it because of this reason or that reason.” Then it was like, “Well, how the hell do I do this?”
I thought of streaming a film as a premiere worldwide, globally, so everybody could watch it at the same time because that had never happened, until My Truth. We did it and then of course it got hijacked with DDOS server attacks so that the film was shut down within the first five minutes, and we couldn’t figure out a way to get it back online for another 13 hours.
The rumor spread that the film didn’t exist, it was all a lie, I was price gouging, I never even made a movie.
All I could do was work to get it up as fast as I could, which we eventually did, but it took 13 hours to get it back online. A lot of people unfortunately had just given up by that point.
We watched basically $80 million just go right out the window because that’s how much ticket sales would’ve been if we were able to stay online and see what we were doing because it was working. We’d already sold 50,000 tickets by that point.
So…Fred and the Loserville tour…?
I think it’s not only us, but it’s our audience because the people who still relate to me, the people who understand me, are probably fine calling themselves losers. Like okay, fine, you want to call us the Losers Club, we can be the Losers Club. That means that we have the humility to accept the fact that we’re winning. It’s a positive.
For those who aren’t aware, Fred and I did our first collaboration back in 2016 for the Angelic 2 the Core album. A big album that I did the Today show for, the “Go 4 It” performance, the song with Snoop Dogg—which, of course, we didn’t have Snoop Dogg on the Today show. We had our good friend Doc Ice.
During that same era, where we did the Snoop Dogg song, we did Doc Ice, we did Kaya Jones from Pussycat Dolls. I did a lot of duets on that album, and one of those duets was Fred. Fred and I did this great song with Scott Page from Pink Floyd, the sax player, and it’s called “Seamless.”. It’s a perfect blend of our styles. It’s really, really cool.
That’s on the Angelic 2 the Core album. People can go back and find that on iTunes, or buy a copy of the CD or whatever if they want to do their research. We also did a live performance together. I think around that year, it was either 2015 or 2016, I joined Limp Bizkit on stage, and we did some karaoke. I did my MJ impression, and I did a little tribute to MJ. I performed “Billie Jean” with Limp Bizkit, and then we did Limp Bizkit’s version of “Faith,” which was a lot of fun.
Fred has become a friend. He’s a great guy. I hosted a telethon that I created for autism on Facebook, and it was the world’s first-ever Facebook autism telethon. It took place over four hours. I got a bunch of my celebrity friends, from Dave Navarro to Fred, you name it. Many people came through on that. It was really powerful. Anyway, we did this great telethon, and Fred performed on it. We’ve done a lot together through the years, but more behind the scenes.
Last year we [Corey’s band] were on tour. We played Riot Fest and made history. I was expecting to see a few hundred people in front of me when we walked out because we played at 2:30 in the afternoon on the smallest stage. I walked out and there was 20,000 people.
You seem really ready to take on whatever comes next.
No, I took a long hiatus. I’m ready. [chuckles] I’m very energetic, very geared up, very ready to do all of this. You have to also understand, as an actor, I may be a little bit jaded because I’m not going to go make a movie unless it’s a movie that I really want to do. If I don’t love the script, don’t love the character, it’s not something I can really sink my teeth into and it’s not a great director, I’m not interested, because I don’t care.
I’ve done over 100 films. I’m only going to care if it’s special, and it’s worth it, and they come to me with an offer. I don’t read for films. I don’t do the audition thing. Literally, I’m over it.
When it comes to the music side, totally different ball of wax because I didn’t get these opportunities before. I was always shunned. I was always kicked to the side. I would volunteer. People don’t know this, but every time there was a major world tragedy like 9/11, for example—I was in New York for 9/11. I was there with the Jackson family—I felt very compelled to want to help.
When all those tributes came around, I was like, “Oh, please let me be a part of this. I want to sing. I want to do whatever I can to donate my time, to help bring in funds, to bring my fanbase to the table.” They were always like, “We don’t have room for you.”
It was like, “Okay. Well, I know my fans care. You may not care and you may not want me here, but I know the value that I bring because I know that my fans care. They’re good people, and they would be here to support this. You’re losing out by cutting that off, but that’s okay. We accept it.”
The point is, now that I’m getting these opportunities, it does mean something. It means a lot. It means that I’ve actually accomplished some goals, to get past that blockade that was around me and my music career for whatever reason. I feel like I’m finally etching on this stone tablet, saying, “Look at me. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”
I’ve always said, it’s tough presenting concepts and ideas people aren’t ready to hear. I hope we learned something from Sinéad O’Connor and honor truthsayers while they’re alive.
In a perfect world, wouldn’t that be so nice? For people to be recognized for the things that they truly stand for and they’re alive. Like you said, Sinéad O’Connor is a great example of a hero, of a strong, determined woman who had great ideas and led the charge in so many ways with feminism and with religion and standing up to your peers and not taking any crap. She was so great at what she did.
I remember seeing the reports about her having depression… I was like, “Does anybody remember that this woman was a leader and did so much to change the world and risked her entire life and career to speak truth to power?” God bless her. Then she was gone. It was almost there. She almost got the recognition she deserved.
There was a bit of a resurgence starting to happen, and then it all went away. The same thing with Corey Haim. It’s so sad to me when that happens. Of course, there’s something in the back of my mind going like, “Gee, there’s a bit of a ticking time bomb here, folks. I’m not going to be around forever.” Hopefully, somebody remembers me before it’s too late and I can still do something about it.
Would you really ever run for president?
I might, but not when all this craziness is going on.
We need some semblance of normality before I can even put my hat into the [ring]. Because right now what’s happening is so far skewed from normality. There’s such little semblance of respect and dignity and class and all those things that are supposed to be about holding your head high. I feel we’ve been robbed of that great dignity.
There is such great dignity and such importance to that office that I would never want to even put my name near it if I wasn’t fully prepared, fully ready, and capable, and in a time where I knew that I could literally get in there to make a difference. Right now, there’s so much back and forth and hate. It’s a disgrace, and it’s a disgrace to the rest of the planet. People are looking at America, it’s supposed to mean something. It’s supposed to represent freedom. It’s supposed to represent strength. It’s supposed to represent equality. I’m hoping that things can straighten themselves out over the next 10 years, and then I can come in and hopefully help realign things to a better, prosperous, more peaceful way, but these are just dreams right now. Don’t go quoting me that I’m going to be the next president or anything because I’m not. You can tell people I’m considering it.
I just don’t want it to be like, “Oh, God, Cory Feldman says he’s going to be the next president.”
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.