David Hasselhoff has a message for the roster of roasters who will try to burn him at “The Comedy Central Roast” at 9 p.m. Sunday. “Bring it on,” he says coolly.
It won’t be the first time someone has taken a shot at the actor. While he’s famous for starring in such shows as “Knight Rider,” “Baywatch,” “America’s Got Talent” and “The Young and the Restless,” he’s just as infamous for being the unwitting star of an amateur video that showed him drunk and shirtless, eating a Wendy’s hamburger on the floor. While we’ve all seen the clip, what we have yet to see is the actor’s response to it. Hasselhoff says that will change at the roast — and he can’t wait.
“I’ve taken so much stuff, and I’ve never had a forum to come back. I could be equally as brutal to everybody else. And this is kind of like, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, watch this! You wanna play? I’m good at this,’ ” he says. “It gives me the chance to take the wind out of everybody else’s sails — because if I make fun of it, nobody else can top me. And then at the end, the funny part about it is, I’m the one who’s walking away with the check.”
Despite Hasselhoff’s confidence, he is not underestimating the enemy. He witnessed the verbal attack unleashed on his former “Baywatch” co-star Pamela Anderson, who has her own infamous home video, when she was in his shoes a few years ago. In fact, he was asked to participate in the assault but declined because he was concerned about hurting his friend’s feelings.
“I was afraid to do it because I love her so much that I didn’t want to roast her,” he says. “And I saw the show, and I’m glad I didn’t do it because I would have been so tame compared to what they did to her.”
If Hasselhoff thinks they were rough on Anderson, wait until he sees what they do to him. But he insists he can take a joke.
“The way to get rid of things is to just let it go and move forward,” he says.
Moving forward is what Hasselhoff is doing. He and his daughters, Taylor and Hayley, have a reality show in the works at A&E Network that will focus on the girls’ attempts to break into the music business. Hayley already has a taste of stardom from her role in the ABC Family series “Huge,” and Dad is proud.
“She got it on her own. They didn’t even want me — they threw me off the set the first day,” he says. “When I watched (the ‘Huge’ pilot), I said, ‘This is going to go on for five years. This is a smash.’ Every show works if you fall in love with the characters, and I already want to see more of the characters.”
Hasselhoff says his new reality show is going to be about family. Don’t expect to see the same guy you’ve watched tooling around in a talking car, saving lives on beaches or taking and delivering verbal jabs on Comedy Central. The show will feature a father helping his kids achieve their dreams. It’s a role he has been playing for years, and it’s the one that matters most to him.
“When I come home,” he says, “I’m not David Hasselhoff. I’m Dad.”
