“Little Rascals” Alum Bug Hall Keeps a $26,000 GoFundMe Overage, Calling It “God’s Will”

Brandon “Bug” Hall, who played Alfalfa in the 1994 film “The Little Rascals,” says he will keep more than $26,000 that donors gave beyond the $2,000 he asked for on GoFundMe.

“God’s will is always something that befuddles me,” Hall, 41, told Page Six in an interview published Nov. 9.

Hall said he set up the fundraiser after a series of setbacks forced his family to move to a new property in rural Arkansas. In the campaign description, quoted by Us Weekly, he wrote that he had “fallen a little behind on the few bills we have,” pointing to his phone bill and propane for the family’s camper. His wife was expecting their sixth child, and he planned to care for her and the children after the birth.

He told Page Six he had turned off GoFundMe’s automatic goal-increase feature and promised to close the campaign once it reached $2,000. Instead, he said, critics who objected to a man under a vow of poverty asking for money mass-reported it for fraud. GoFundMe locked the campaign during a Trust and Safety review, he said, so he could neither withdraw the money nor shut it down. By the time the platform cleared the fundraiser and told him the funds would be transferred within two to five days, the total was far past the goal.

“If that whole situation hadn’t happened, I would have been out of this whole thing at $2,000 and been happy,” he said.

He rejected the idea that keeping the money breaks his word. “I never said anything about overages because I never considered that possibility,” he said. He told Page Six he would accept it “as a gift from God,” and said it would let the family buy farm animals, a tractor and a sawmill and eventually build a house so they can move out of the camper. “This money is life-changing money for the vast majority of Americans,” he said. “With the life I’ve chosen, it’s life-changing for me too.”

Hall said the vow of poverty is a lay vow, not a complete renunciation of money. He said he looks for paid work when there is an immediate need that cannot be met another way, and that the family keeps its monthly overhead to about $300.

The attention has also revived Hall’s legal history. In June 2020, police in Weatherford, Texas, were called to a hotel to check on a possible overdose and found Hall, then 35, in a room with multiple cans of air duster, according to Fox 4 in Dallas-Fort Worth. He admitted inhaling from them and was charged with misdemeanor possession or use of a volatile chemical. TMZ reported at the time that his family had asked police to check on him. He was released on a $1,500 bond.

Hall told Page Six that the arrest came during a relapse after about 12 years of sobriety. He called it “the worst day of my life” and said it led to the vow of poverty. He said he had just finished executive-producer work on a Netflix show, his family was out of town, and he saw an opening. “So I relapsed, and it was horrifying for my wife,” he said. He said he welcomes people bringing up the mugshot. “I hope it never stops being brought up. I’m not above relapse and wretchedness.”

He was arrested again earlier this year in Arkansas for failing to appear at a 2024 court date on a charge of driving without vehicle liability insurance, Page Six reported.

Mark Groubert read the Page Six account on Wednesday’s show and moved quickly from the fundraiser to the arrests. “This is a bizarre story,” he said of the GoFundMe dispute, noting that a $2,000 request had drawn about $27,000 largely on the strength of a 30-year-old movie role.

His retelling of the 2020 arrest differed from the police account. He told viewers Hall had been found huffing air duster at a dumpster outside the hotel before officers found his room full of empty cans. Weatherford police, as reported by Fox 4, said officers found Hall inside a hotel room with the cans after a welfare check. No report reviewed for this article mentions a dumpster.

For Groubert, the inhalant use was the real story. “His addiction to Dust-Off is much more interesting to me because that is a real addiction,” he said.

Hall said he cannot imagine returning to acting professionally.