‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ Star Scraps With Fan in Bizarre Video

Whose Line Is It Anyway? stalwart Colin Mochrie got into a bizarre scuffle with a fan in Beverly Hills on Monday. He was caught on camera using a videocassette to hit the fan repeatedly in the head before the fan got away. A representative for the comedian later told TMZ the whole thing was planned for a pilot Mochrie, 63, is working on.

TMZ posted a video of the incident on Monday. The clip showed a man in a purple jacket approaching Mochrie to get a VHS autographed on a street corner. Mochrie did not look very happy about that and began hitting the fan with the tape. Some onlookers could be heard laughing as the fan wrestled away from Mochrie.

Mochrie’s rep later told TMZ it was a staged incident. “Colin just happened to be shooting a sketch for an untitled tv pilot when the TMZ cameras caught him,” his reps said in another statement to PEOPLE. “There was no altercation whatsoever.”

It’s surprising to see Mochrie involved in a staged skit since his best-known work is his improvisations on Whose Line Is It Anway?. He starred in the original British version from 1991 to 1999, then starred in the U.S. version, which began in 1998. Mochrie, Ryan Stiles, and Wayne Brady all returned when the U.S. version was revived for The CW in 2013. Whose Line Is It Anyway? Season 18 debuted last month and airs on Saturdays at 8 p.m. ET.

In a recent interview with Film Inquiry, Mochrie broke down the differences between working with a script and working without one. “What’s great about improv is that you don’t really have to make sense. If you actually transcribed a lot of the Whose Line? scenes, you’d go, ‘This is nonsense!’ It’s truly an art form of that moment. The audience and the performers fuse together to make that funny moment,” the Scotland-born comedian said. “With scripts, you’re there to get the writer’s point-of-view out and make sure that their message is clear. So yeah, two different muscles.”

In the same interview, Mochrie admitted that he missed having the safety net that comes with improv. When you don’t have a script, you don’t have something to stick to. “Improv has its own set of skills that you need, but to be able to get the same laugh on the same line night after night is a different skill set because you have to be totally committed the entire time,” he said. “You can’t just let your mind wander.”