I've read enough celebrity exposés to know that a fair number of America's most rich and famous people have lost touch with reality. But no other celebrity's eccentricities even come close to the sheer insanity of Terrence Howard, whose ramblings wouldn't seem out of place if you heard them shouted by a homeless schizophrenic person on the subway.
While the Rolling Stone article covers a large portion of Terrence Howard's life, including his multiple domestic abuse charges and truly traumatic childhood (during which he witnessed his father murder another man while waiting in line to see a mall Santa), the meat of the story revolves around Howard's obsession with proving a batsh*t insane new version of math that he made up.
"This is the last century that our children will ever have been taught that one times one is one," said Howard to the baffled Rolling Stone interviewer. "They won't have to grow up in ignorance. Twenty years from now, they'll know that one times one equals two. We're about to show a new truth. The true universal math."
Terrence Howard
As it turns out, when he's not acting, Terrence Howard spends the bulk of his time (he estimates around 17 hours a day) constructing and soldering bizarrely shaped objects made of copper wire, magnet, and plastic. He believes that these shapes prove something or other about the flow of energy in the universe––a theory that he has extensively written about in a secret made-up language called Terryology. Again, to clarify, all of this is true and sourced directly from Rolling Stone.
But if this was just about a wealthy man who doesn't understand math dedicating his life to building stupid objects, that would be strange but not necessarily haunting. The problem, though, is that Terrence Howard dragged his wife, Mira Pak, into his spiraling insanity.
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In a heartbreaking quote to Rolling Stone, Pak, who had been a model and restaurateur in California before having a baby with Howard and moving to Chicago, conveyed the reality of their married life:
"We don't have a normal life. In our two years together, I've only gone to restaurants with him two or three times. We've never been to the supermarket together. We've never been to the movies. I've never gotten a gift from him. Never, never. And then every minute that he has free, it's to do this. I help him, cutting, drawing and putting things together. I've developed a slight form of agoraphobia lately. I never go out. I have no friends here. I feel like Rapunzel, you know, stuck in a penthouse with my baby."
Just imagine having a whirlwind romance with a famous actor, getting married after only a few weeks, having a baby together, and leaving your whole life behind to move with them to a city where you don't know anyone else. Then, once you're nice and stuck, you come to the realization that the actor is a crazy person who expects you to spend all of your days building weird shapes with him. How do you leave a scenario like that when you have a kid together and are, most likely, financially dependent on said actor? Would you slowly plot your escape, or would you go insane along with him and start to believe in his wrong form of math?
Unfortunately for Pak, the answer seems to be something akin to Stockholm syndrome. Rolling Stone noted that Pak had filed for divorce from Howard before the interview even took place, but they still appeared as a couple during the interview. Pak and Howard did end up divorcing in 2015, but the couple became re-engaged in 2018. One might presume that Pak and her children will spend the rest of eternity building dumb shapes with Howard.
In case anyone is wondering, yes, four years later, Terrence Howard is still at it. In a recent Emmy red carpet interview, Howard told a shocked reporter: "All energy in the universe is expressed in motion, all motion is expressed in waves, all waves are curves, so where does [sic] the straight lines come from to make the Platonic solids? There are no straight lines. So when I took the flower of life and opened it properly, I found whole new wave conjugations that expose the in-between spaces. It's the thing that holds us all together."
It probably goes without saying, but that's not what the question was about.
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