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. This was just for fun. This is why I bring this up. He ended up getting a lot of it. He was in that situation and I felt terrible. 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. In the video, you can actually see me eating that burger.
“I think a lot of people obviously thought it was real because of my acting skills. That was amazing! 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 am sorry that they took a little bit of hatred .”
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.
Despite this, Volkanovski continues to work on other projects. He was recently featured in an Australian rap video featuring the group HP Boyz. Although Hasbulla had been supposed to be there, the celebrity was too busy with his other projects.
“Good bloke,” Volkanovski said of Hasbulla. He is busy, but he’s very active. It was my intention to appear in the rap video, which he did with his HP Boyz. The song is actually very good. Go check it out [Watch the Wick], We’re in that film clip. Hasbulla didn’t make it, but I was in the film clip, so it was cool.”
