Now Trending: Jonah Hill apologizes for homophobic slur

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Jonah Hill says he's sorry for making a homophobic slur and hopes others learn from his mistake.

The Wolf of Wall Street star went onto radio on Tuesday to express his remorse at lashing out at a member of the tabloid press with a harmful homophobic epithet.

As first reported by TMZ, Hill and an unidentified friend were hounded by a team of paparazzi on the streets of Los Angeles last weekend.

In a video of the incident, Hill and his companion were followed down a side street as the photographers tried several times to engage him.

At one point, a paparazzo, poking fun at Hill's floral print shorts, says, "I like the shorts though, bro. They are pretty sexy."

Hill responded with a crude homophobic slur, which resulted in him shifting to full damage-control mode during his appearance on Howard Stern's satellite radio broadcast on Tuesday morning.

In response to Stern's suggestion that he sounded angry during the interview, Hill said, "Anger is not the right word at all."

Getting right to the point, Hill said, "I'm upset because from the day I was born, and publicly, I've been a gay rights activist."

For the benefit of Stern's listeners, Hill deconstructed the events leading up to the incident.

"Now, this person, you saw a 40-second video," he said. "This person had been following me around – just to give it some context, not excusing what I said in any way – this person had been following me around all day, had been saying hurtful things about my family, really hurtful things about me personally, and I played into exactly what he wanted and lost my cool."

And at the point, said Hill, he lost his composure and uttered a gay expletive (reminding us of a past Alec Baldwin incident).

"In that moment I said a disgusting word that does not at all reflect how I feel about any group of people," Hill told Stern. "I grew up with gay family members. I'm leaving here to go spend the day with one of my closest co-workers and best friend who is gay, who's getting married, who I'm going to stand at his wedding. You know?"

At the same time, Hill insisted that he didn't come on the radio program to make phony excuses.

"I'm not at all defending my choice of words, but I am happy to be the poster boy for thinking about what you say and how those words, even if you don't intend them and how they mean, they are rooted in hate, and that's [expletive] and I shouldn't have said that."

Last year, Hill (@JonahHill) tweeted a photograph of himself wearing a T-shirt with the phrase "Love Conquers Hate" in Russian emblazoned on the front.

The t-shirts were created by the advocacy group Human Rights Campaign to protest Russia's treatment of the LGBT community.

In an interview with E! News on why he voiced his stance on Russia's anti-gay laws , Hill said, "I have tons of gay friends, gay family members. It's like saying, 'Why do you think these people should breathe?"

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