World Footy News

On a promotional tour to Australia for the new Fantastic Four movie, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, some of the Hollywood actors in the cast (Ioan Gruffudd, Michael Chiklis and Jessica Alba), were treated to an introduction to Australian culture. As part of this, they attended an AFL Aussie Rules game between classic rivals Hawthorn and Essendon at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. This was their first experience of the sport, and subsequent interviews with the stars revealed nothing but praise for the Australian game.

The stars continued on to several media appearances while in Melbourne, including on the Aussie Rules television show Before the Game. But it was at the TV Week Logies (roughly Australia's equivalent of the Golden Globe awards) presentation in Melbourne where they expressed their true appreciation for the game.

Alba, who plays the "Invisible Woman", when asked if she understood what was going on in the game said, "almost straight away", and asked about the highlights, she responded that the game was "exciting" and "violent" and that there were lots of "cute guys" out there.

Chiklis, who plays "The Thing" when asked about the game said he was suprised that the players "wear no pads" (meaning protective equipment) and that "Australians are very tough" and would "not look at American Football in the same way again".

Strangely enough, the comments were made on channel 9, a channel which lost the rights to AFL and which new CEO (and Collingwood Football Club president), Eddie McGuire controversially said would now be promoting NRL over AFL. And despite the great publicity for the AFL and the growing television ratings of Aussie Rules in general, the sport failed to take out any Logie awards. The only nominations were rival shows - Ten network's Before the Game and Nine network's AFL Footy Show. Interestingly enough, the NRL Footy Show ended up taking out the most popular sports program logie and the FIFA World Cup won the most outstanding Sports Coverage logie.

The Fantastic Four are the most recent to join the growing list of big international celebrities being introduced to the game.