The most bizarre celebrity apologies of 2023

Somebody somewhere once wisely said that if you wrong another person in private, you should apologize to them in private - and if you wrong someone in public, you should apologize in public.

So it must be exhausting being a celebrity: When all your little gaffes and jokes gone wrong happen in full view of the world, you can easily find yourself apologizing, very publicly, for a wide, weird range of things.

This year, once again, the rich and famous blundered and regretted their way through the year. Here are seven of the strangest things celebrities apologized for in 2023.

Criticizing Nicole Kidman's sitting posture

In September, comedian Amy Schumer posted a photo of actress Nicole Kidman at a U.S. Open tennis match, sitting with one hand under her chin. "This how human sit," Schumer wrote. Schumer later deleted the post, but not before commenters began to complain. One fan, according to Page Six, wrote incredulously, "Are you cyberbullying Oscar and Emmy winner Nicole Kidman right now?"

Schumer addressed the situation via another Instagram story soon afterward. "I want to apologize to all the people I hurt posting a photo of Nicole Kidman and alluding to her being an alien," she wrote in a Story later publicized by PopCrave. "I will be asking the cast of that 70s show to write letters advocating for my forgiveness," she wrote (referring to Danny Masterson's "That '70s Show" castmates writing supportive letters to the judge during his rape trial), and added the hashtag "#takingtimetoheal."

Dressing up as Johnny Depp

Look: Over the past two decades, untold numbers of us have raided our mothers' and grandmothers' scarf and blouse collections to dress up as Johnny Depp's "Pirates of the Caribbean" character, Jack Sparrow. To dress up as Depp himself, however - as he looked in his high-profile, ugly 2022 trial, in which he and ex-wife Amber Heard accused each other of domestic abuse and were both ruled to have defamed each other - feels distinctly less fun and frothy.

Emily Hampshire, best known for her portrayal of Stevie Budd on "Schitt's Creek," learned that lesson when she and a friend dressed as Depp and Heard for Halloween. When photos of the pair - with Hampshire in a pinstripe suit with a wine bottle - surfaced, backlash materialized swiftly. "Domestic abuse is never, ever funny. These are real issues with real people and I REALLY regret my actions," she wrote on Instagram. "In the future I will do better. I'm so sorry."

Jumping over a fan

A$AP Rocky made the opposite of a grand entrance at the Met Gala in May, accidentally winding up outside the event among onlookers instead of on the red carpet. To jump a barricade, the rapper pushed his way to the front of the crowd and hoisted himself up on the shoulder of a woman next to him, knocking her glasses off in the process.

That woman, who the New York Post identified only as Maddy, posted her reaction to the incident on X: "ASAP Rocky just literally jumped over me."

"LOL MY FAULT $WEETHEART," A$AP Rocky posted in response, and promptly followed Maddy's account on the social media platform.

Accidentally suing a fan for a quarter-million dollars

Luke Combs woke up early one December morning to some bad, bizarre news: His legal team had sued a Florida woman, Nicol Harness, for $250,000 for selling unofficial merchandise with Combs's likeness on it. Harness, a fan, had told a local news outlet that she'd sold 18 Luke Combs tumblers for $20 each and that she'd been in the hospital for congestive heart failure when the email from Combs's lawyers arrived and missed the 21-day response window as a result. Upon returning home she learned her Amazon account had been locked because of the lawsuit, preventing her from accessing any funds she'd recently earned through sales.

Combs recorded and released a TikTok soon afterward that revealed he'd spoken to Harness to apologize directly, and had given her $11,000 - twice the amount that was now inaccessible in her Amazon account due to the lawsuit. "She was never supposed to be involved in anything like this. No fan should ever have to be involved in anything like this," he said.

Combs also began selling similar tumblers on his own website and donating the proceeds to Harness's family for her medical care.

Joking that Britney Spears should get a "muzzle"

Britney Spears's memoir, "The Woman in Me," published in October, challenged a number of long-held assumptions - including the widely held belief that her relationship with Justin Timberlake in her late teen years had ended after Spears was unfaithful. Instead, the book alleges, Timberlake dumped Spears via text message when she was still envisioning a future together and had even undergone an abortion she didn't want to preserve the relationship.

Timbaland, a close collaborator of Timberlake's in the years following the split (and the producer of "Cry Me a River," the song that convinced many that Spears's infidelity caused it), said in an appearance at the Kennedy Center in late October, "She going crazy, right? I wanted to call and say, 'JT, you gotta put a muzzle on that girl.'"

Though Timbaland himself is responsible for "Apologize," one of history's catchiest songs about the statute of limitations on saying sorry, in this case his remorse was prompt. "I'm sorry to all the Britney fans, even to her," the producer said in early November. "You have a voice. You speak what you want to speak. Who am I to tell you what not to speak? And I was wrong for saying that."

Playing a role on Star Trek too comedically - in 1987

Armin Shimerman, who played a member of the Ferengi alien species in an early episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and played a Ferengi named Quark in the Star Trek series "Deep Space Nine," apologized over the summer on Star Trek podcast "The Shuttlepod Show" for his initial performance, which had a distinctly comic-relief tone. The Ferengi, Shimerman said, "were supposed to be threatening. We were supposed to be a menace to the Federation. We were supposed to be everything that the Klingons were and more. And I had the largest Ferengi part on that episode . . . I thought I played it seriously, but I failed miserably.

"I apologize for that first episode. Not the episode, my performance," Shimerman added. "It was nothing like what I was told they wanted. And I'm the one that screwed up. It's all my fault. I take responsibility."

Letting a "Wheel of Fortune" contestant go on a weird tangent about naked ghosts

Even after Pat Sajak's 42 years at the helm of "Wheel of Fortune," things on-set can still get away from him. In October, the host apologized after a stray comment to a contestant turned into a deeply weird exchange.

Sajak, reading from a cue card, asked contestant Ronnie if he was involved in the paranormal. Ronnie's responses started out fine: "You know, I was, about 15 years ago, I was a part of a team as a skeptic because I just don't believe in ghosts," he said. Then he went on: "I think they're kind of weird, and somebody that haunts a place and wears a Victorian outfit, it just doesn't make sense to me very much. If I were the ghost, I'd be a nude ghost." The crowd gasped instead of laughing, and Ronnie attempted to steer into the proverbial skid. "Scaring people in more than one way," he added.

Sajak replied, after a moment, "You know, I'm just really sorry I got into all this."