REEL FACE: | REAL FACE: |
Daniel Webber
Born: June 28, 1988 Birthplace: Gosford, New South Wales, Australia | Vince Neil
Born: February 8, 1961 Birthplace: Hollywood, California, USA |
Douglas Booth
Born: July 9, 1992 Birthplace: Greenwich, London, England, UK | Nikki Sixx
Born: December 11, 1958 Birthplace: San Jose, California, USA |
Iwan Rheon
Born: May 13, 1985 Birthplace: Carmarthen, Wales, UK | Mick Mars
Born: April 4, 1955 Birthplace: Terre Haute, Indiana, USA |
Machine Gun Kelly
Born: April 22, 1990 Birthplace: Cleveland, Ohio, USA | Tommy Lee
Born: October 3, 1962 Birthplace: Athens, Greece |
Rebekah Graf
Born: July 27, 1982 Birthplace: Corpus Christi, Texas, USA | Heather Locklear
Born: September 25, 1961 Birthplace: Los Angeles, California, USA |
David Costabile
Born: January 9, 1967 Birthplace: Washington, D.C. | Doc McGhee
Born: 1950 Birthplace: USA |
Leven Rambin
Born: May 17, 1990 Birthplace: Houston, Texas, USA | Sharise Neil
Born: October 27, 1964 Birthplace: Huntington Beach, California, USA |
Tony Cavalero
Born: October 12, 1983 | Ozzy Osbourne
Born: December 3, 1948 Birthplace: Aston, Birmingham, England, UK |
Pete Davidson
Born: November 16, 1993 Birthplace: Staten Island, New York City, New York, USA | Tom Zutaut
Born: May 11, 1959 |
Kathryn Morris
Born: January 28, 1969 Birthplace: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA | Deana Richards
Birthplace: Idaho, USA |
According to the Mötley Crüe autobiography The Dirt, the highly explicit sex scene involving Tommy Lee (Machine Gun Kelly) did happen in real life. However, the only way to verify such scenes that were out of public view is by way of what the band members have stated, including in the book. "The movie is definitely sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll," said Vince Neil. "It's really all three of those." (KaaosTV).
The Mötley Crüe movie had been stuck in development for more than a decade and was once attached to Paramount and MTV. Nikki Sixx said that "a certain CEO of a certain company" refused to make the film if the raunchy opening scene was included. Eventually, they teamed with Netflix, who promised them that they would not sanitize the true story. "We had the final veto on the script, and we OK'd everything because we thought it was telling our story," said Sixx. "We felt it needed to be truthful." -Rolling Stone
No. The film finds Tommy Lee bumping into Nikki Sixx by chance at a Denny's after seeing Nikki's band London perform. Nikki tells Tommy that the band is breaking up and that he's planning to form a new band. He welcomes Tommy to try out to be the drummer, despite Tommy mentioning that his only experience was playing in his high school marching band. In reality, Tommy was the drummer in a band named Suite 19. Nikki had seen them in concert and was impressed. Their encounter at Denny's was not random. It was a planned meeting to talk about putting together a new band. -Rolling Stone
No. The original lead singer of Mötley Crüe was O'Dean Peterson, who was part of the band when they recorded their earliest studio demos. Nikki Sixx and Mick Mars felt that O'Dean was too much of a hippie and had an attitude that didn't quite mesh well with the others. They kicked him out and most fans aren't even aware of his existence. However, O'Dean still makes occasional appearances onstage in Los Angeles as a Mötley Crüe cover artist.
In The Dirt movie, the band first meets Vince Neil at a backyard party where he sings Billy Squier's "My Kind of Lover" as a group of women swoon over him. In reality, that song hadn't even been released yet. According to the true story, the band first met with Vince Neil at The Starwood nightclub in West Hollywood, and it took several weeks of stalking him before he agreed to a jam session. When he eventually did come to a session, they didn't play "Live Wire" because Nikki Sixx hadn't penned the song yet. -Rolling Stone
Yes. A fact-check of The Dirt Netflix movie reveals this to be true. Sixx grew up in a broken home. His father left when he was young, and he later went to live with his grandparents after his mother abandoned him. Eventually, his grandparents sent him back to live with his mother.
He once got into an argument with his mother, after which he threw his stereo and damaged the TV. He borrowed a knife from a neighbor and began to stab himself above his elbow, sinking the knife all the way to the bone. Like in the film, his plan was to call the police and have his mother hauled away for child abuse. However, when the police arrived they told him that if he pressed charges against his mother, he would have to live in a juvenile home for the next four years until he reached the age of 18. Sixx decided against pressing charges and instead left home.
"The most painful part of the film is my relationship with my mother and how I could never mend that," Sixx told Forbes. "There is a scene where she is calling me and I can’t pick up the phone. I'm addicted to drugs but have huge animosity because she abandoned me." He got sober after rehab but never mended his relationship with his mother before she passed away.
Yes. The Dirt true story confirms that this happened when the band was in a hotel in Germany. They were hanging out with Claude Schnell, the keyboard player from Dio. After getting high in his room, they thought it would be funny if they threw his hotel room furniture, including the TV, out the window. The furniture smashed into two brand-new Mercedes-Benzes that were parked below. -The Dirt Autobiography
This supposedly happened when Ozzy Osbourne toured with Mötley Crüe and rode on their bus. "It was like trying to kind of outdo each other," recalled Vince Neil. "Nikki snorted some ants, so Ozzy snorted these ants, but then Ozzy peed...and then licked up the pee." Nikki Sixx apparently started to do the same, but then like in the movie, Ozzy went down and licked up Sixx's pee.
As for Ozzy, he has no recollection that he actually snorted ants. "Mötley Crüe say something about the fact that I snorted a line of ants one time," said Ozzy. "And I have got no, absolute no recollection of doing that."
Yes. As we separated the facts from the fiction in The Dirt, we learned that while the band was in Switzerland, Vince and Tommy bought flare guns and fired one inside their hotel room. It ricocheted off the walls before setting the bed on fire. They also broke the glass windows in the hotel's elevators. -The Dirt Autobiography
Speaking of fire, Nikki Sixx said that they really did use hairspray and lighters to kill the cockroaches in their apartment. "That's a hundred percent true," Sixx said.
Yes. On December 8, 1984, Vince Neil was driving drunk and wrecked, which left his passenger, 24-year-old Hanoi Rocks drummer Razzle, dead. The accident reportedly happened much like it does in The Dirt movie. Neil and Razzle were on their way home from the local liquor store. Neil was driving drunk and going close to 65mph in a 25mph zone when the car went into a 35-foot slide sideways after hitting a patch of water on the road. The car then collided with an oncoming vehicle. The occupants in the other car, a Volkswagen, were seriously injured and suffered brain damage. Neil's blood alcohol level was 0.17, well above California's then-legal limit of 0.10. His punishment included just 30 days in jail (of which he served 19) and five years probation. He was ordered to pay $2.6 million in restitution.
Yes. In researching The Dirt true story, we discovered that not everything in the Mötley Crüe movie happens exactly when it did in real life. For example, a scene that takes place at the start of Mötley Crüe's Theatre of Pain tour features a sad looking Vince Neil being visited by his wife, Sharise, and their daughter, Skylar. In real life, Neil wasn't yet married to Sharise. However, the scene does line up with the period when Neil was the only sober member of the band (following his manslaughter drunk driving conviction). -Rolling Stone
Yes. Skylar, Neil's daughter with second wife Sharise Ruddell, passed away from a rare form of cancer on August 15, 1995 at the age of four. Doctors first believed it was appendicitis, but during the operation to remove her appendix, they found tumors. She was diagnosed with Wilms' tumor, a kidney cancer that affects children. Skylar endured six operations and extensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments over the course of the next four months, but it didn't stop the disease. "This ordeal is something no parent should have to go through," said Neil following her death (People). Neil recounts the story in further detail in the band's autobiography The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band.
Yes. As we analyzed the facts vs. the fiction in the movie, we learned that according to Tommy Lee, this happened in real life. When the filmmakers were trying to figure out how to recreate the scene, they hired a real stripper and she suggested that actor Machine Gun Kelly actually puke on her, which apparently made it into the movie. -Rolling Stone
Yes. Mars was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis at age 17. It's a form of arthritis that mainly affects the spine and pelvis. The condition manifests in severe discomfort and chronic pain. In advanced cases of ankylosing spondylitis, the inflammation can lead to the formation of new bone that causes various sections of the spine to fuse in a rigid, immobile position. The real Mick Mars told actor Iwan Rheon, who portrays him in the film, that "it feels like your whole spine is turning into slow-drying concrete, slowly pulling you down" (Rolling Stone). The movie shows Mars getting hip replacement surgery sometime around 1996, but in real life he didn't have the surgery done until 2004.
Yes. In 1987, Nikki Sixx overdosed on heroin and was declared legally dead on the way to the hospital. After two minutes, he was brought back to life by shots of adrenaline to the heart. The Dirt movie seems to be in line with the true story, depicting this as it's been reported. -Forbes
Yes, but it happened in 1998 after their album Generation Swine was a flop. The movie doesn't show it, but they were only able to secure the rights after a long, grueling battle with Elektra head Sylvia Rhone. Unlike the film, Tom Zutaut had no involvement in any of this. By then, he had already left Elektra for Geffen.
"The band has lots of regrets," Nikki Sixx said in a Build Series interview. "We wouldn't do a movie like this if we were just only celebrating. There's a lot to celebrate about the movie – the music is very important, the music that we made is still important. ... I just think that you have to be honest about decisions that we made and then how we got to where we're at today."
Sixx says that the band didn't have anyone to steer them in the right direction. "Back then, every time we did something wrong, we sold more records and we got another pat on the back. We were like being trained to be dysfunctional."
Not all of them. After the actors were cast, the producers had them go through a month or so of training that they referred to as "band camp". Game of Thrones actor Iwan Rheon, who portrays the band's guitarist, Mick Mars, did already know how to play guitar prior to being cast. -Rolling Stone
Not all of the band members visited the New Orleans set during the filming, but they did speak extensively with their onscreen counterparts. "I think that they captured it really truthfully," Nikki Sixx told Rolling Stone. "Of my friends or my wives that have seen it, a lot of people cry at different parts of the movie. A lot of laughter, a lot of crying, a lot of shock. Honestly, I hate to say this, but I think they got every fu**ing thing perfect."
Further get in rhythm with The Dirt true story by watching the Mötley Crüe music videos below, including the video for their new song 'The Dirt', as well as videos for some of their biggest hits.