Alexander Volkanovski and Hasbulla shared a laugh recently, but not everyone found their antics amusing.
The UFC featherweight champion — and MMA Fighting’s No. 1 pound-for-pound fighter — recently uploaded a video with Hasbulla as part of his Cooking with Volk series and the segment ended with the popular social media personality stuffing a burger in Volkanovski’s face.
During an appearance on The MMA Hour, Volkanovski pulled back the curtain behind the prank and apologized for the criticism that Hasbulla received for being part of the gag.
“I’ll be straight-up with this,” Volkanovski said. “Everyone does the Hasbulla thing and then obviously gets punched in the face and all that type of stuff, so this was actually planned. I planned this just for a bit of a laugh. The reason why I’m bringing this up is because he ended up copping a little bit about it, especially with his religion and wasting food and all that type of stuff, things like that. So I felt bad because I put him in that position. I told him with my burger, ‘You can hit there,’ and I ended up eating the burger so it actually didn’t go to waste. You actually see me in the video eating that burger.
“I think a lot of people obviously thought it was real because of my acting skills. How good was that? Everyone’s like, ‘Oh man, how’d you take that?’ It was planned. Sorry to ruin it for everyone, but I wanted to touch on that because when we’re dealing with Hasbulla and his team, they’re really cool, so I appreciate them doing that. I apologize for them copping a bit of hate about it.”
Volkanovski is currently gearing up to be the backup for the UFC 280 main event on Oct. 22, a battle for a vacant lightweight title between Charles Oliveira and Islam Makhachev. He fully expects to be the next man up should one of those competitors fall out, despite 155-pound contender Beneil Dariush disputing that claim.
That said, Volkanovski still finds time to pursue other projects, including recently appearing in a video with Australian rap group HP Boyz. In fact, Hasbulla was supposed to join him, but the diminutive celebrity couldn’t make time for his new pal.
“Good bloke,” Volkanovski said of Hasbulla. “Busy though, really busy. I was meant to be in a rap video with him with the HP Boyz, it’s actually a really good song. So go check that out, [Watch the Wick], we’re in the film clip. Hasbulla didn’t make it, but I was in the film clip, so it was cool.”
