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Ricky Gervais returns to host the Golden Globe Awards this coming January

By Brittney MacDonald, Life & Style Editor

As many of you may have read, comedian, actor, and director Ricky Gervais will be hosting the Golden Globes this coming January. This will be Gervais’s fourth time at the helm of the awards show, his last appearance as host being in 2012. Despite his popularity with the television audience, Gervais is not known for being a favoured host of the Hollywood elite. His no-holds-barred humor has gotten him in trouble many times, something that most believe lead to American sweethearts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler taking over for the past four years.

Gervais is notorious for calling out other actors and actresses for questionable behaviour. Case in point: in 2011, he introduced presenter Scarlett Johansson as “…beautiful, talented, and Jewish apparently. Mel Gibson told me that. He’s obsessed,” verbally addressing the Australian actor’s now notorious anti-Semitism back when Gibson was still considered one of the A-list.

Perhaps one of his most scathing and controversial moments to date is when Gervais commented: “Also not nominated, I Love You Phillip Morris. Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor, two heterosexual actors pretending to be gay. So, the complete opposite of some famous Scientologists, then. My lawyers helped with the wording of that joke…,” alluding to the rumours that several well-known Scientologist actors such as Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Will Smith are all closeted homosexuals. This is due to L. Ron Hubbard’s publication Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, in which he classifies homosexuality as a mental illness that can be cured. Hubbard founded the Church of Scientology in 1954, and Dianetics is the main text.

Whatever Gervais does with his hosting powers this year, it is definitely bound to be interesting.