Do you know which Grammy-winning musician had to help midwife a cow while under the influence of
peyote? Here's a few stories that celebrities have shared about their wildest experiences on drugs.
Ben Stiller was full of optimism when he tried acid for the first time with his friends.
In his interview for Netflix's "Have a Good Trip:
Adventures in Psychedelics," the legendary comic actor admitted,
"I was hoping for some sort of psychedelic revelation."
After the first LSD tab seemed to have no effect, Stiller promptly dropped a second,
but instantly regretted his decision. He said,
"Immediately I started to freak out… We were walking towards where they blow up the balloon
animals for the Thanksgiving Day Parade, and I started to trip out on that idea.
Evil giant inflated characters were flipping up and coming out of 77th Street."
In a panic, he called his dad, fellow actor Jerry Stiller, who was out of town with his
wife Anne Meara filming an episode of "The Love Boat." Fortunately for Ben,
his father had experienced something similar once before… or so he claimed. Stiller remembered,
"My dad said, 'I understand what you're going through,
when I was 10 years old I smoked a Pall Mall cigarette and I was sick for two days.'"
Jerry, who passed away in 2020,
eventually managed to calm his tripping son down. Ben hasn't taken LSD since.
When he sat down for an interview with W Magazine, former Spider-Man actor Andrew Garfield revealed
that he spent his 29th birthday super high in The Happiest Place on Earth, admitting,
"We went to Disneyland and we ate pot brownies. It was literally heaven."
Garfield, who was accompanied by eight of his closest friends — including his
then-girlfriend Emma Stone — went on Space Mountain three times and later,
quote, "freaked out" during "It's A Small World." He told the magazine,
"I was like, 'It is! It is a f---ing small world!'"
According to Garfield, he and his friends somehow all ended up on the
exact same wavelength during their trip, saying,
"There was a song that was playing, coming out of the trees. At one point we all started
to look around going, 'We're all doing the same dance! How did this happen?!'"
By this point, the entire group was seriously stoned,
but their perpetually positive tour guide was apparently none the wiser. Garfield added,
"I think she was that innocent and pure of heart that she had no idea that we were on drugs."
There's been a lot of tragedy in Rosie Perez's life, but the resilient star has plenty of good
memories from her pre-Hollywood days, too. The actor opened up about a wild experience
with psychedelics in "Have a Good Trip," revealing that she was once dosed with a
drug-laced cocktail during a night out with her sister. The effects were sudden: she elaborated,
"The wooden floorboards were waving as if they were water on the high seas,
and I'm looking at it going, 'This is beautiful! Oh my gosh!'"
Things were going great… until Perez decided that she wanted to take a swim. She continued,
"So I went on my back and I started doing the backstroke
on the floorboards because they were waves, of course."
The former co-host of "The View" had a wardrobe malfunction as she backstroked on the dance floor,
but was apparently having such a good time that she didn't care.
It wasn't until she got home that night that her trip started to turn bad. She recalled,
"When I laid into the bed, I became the bed. I'm trying to flip myself over, like my body [is]
the mattress, and I'm waddling down the hallway — still didn't occur to me that I was high on acid."
Thankfully, Perez was able to sleep it off.
Believe it or not, Seth Rogen's wildest drug story isn't about weed — the comedian didn't
tend to discriminate when it came to substances during his early days.
"Let's do all the drugs."
During an interview with Jimmy Kimmel,
the "Pineapple Express" star revealed that he and a friend once had a rocky
experience on magic mushrooms while visiting Amsterdam. Rogen told Kimmel,
"We decided we were going to do a bunch of mushrooms, because that sounded fun."
Rogen, who was 18 at the time of the trip, was originally planning on accompanying his friend
to a picnic in the park, but things started going off the rails when the future comedy star
realized that he needed the bathroom, and fast. With nowhere else to go, he,
quote, "burst into a tiny little cafe," terrifying the locals. He continued,
"I was in there for an hour… Like, I don't even know if I went."
When Rogen finally found his friend, he was in a paranoid state.
His pal insisted they hightail it out of the city entirely, and Rogen,
who had eaten way too many mushrooms after a mix-up with the weight, agreed. He recalled,
"We went to the train station while still fully tripping on mushrooms and we bought
tickets to Paris. We arrived in Paris in the middle of the night as we were
kind of sobering up. We were like, 'Why are we in Paris right now?'"
Carrie Fisher's interview for "Have a Good Trip" was among the last that she filmed prior to her
death in December 2016. The "Star Wars" icon got candid about her past relationship with LSD,
which she described as a "ritual drug" during her segment, elaborating,
"I took a lot of LSD. I would organize trips around to places in the world, simply to take
acid there. I would do these things and forget that I looked like someone named Princess Leia."
Fisher also revealed that she accidentally gave a bunch of tourists a real eyeful
during one of her acid-fuelled holidays in the Seychelles, saying,
"I'm with my Super 8 movie camera […] and I'm filming my friend […] I
can't imagine that I'm nude, but certainly, I'm topless."
When the actor sensed a, quote, "disturbance in the Force," she spun around to see that the
secluded stretch of beach they had chosen for their spontaneous shoot was actually
a hotspot for day-trippers staying at a local hotel. To the tourists' surprise,
Fisher and her friend were doing some day-tripping of their own.
In a separate interview with Rolling Stone,
Fisher said that she had done LSD with her ex-husband Paul Simon, joking simply,
"My coat caught fire. We laughed at the flames."
Hollywood megastar Samuel L. Jackson has been open about his experimentation with drugs
during his younger years. However, he claimed to have a good reason for it, telling Jimmy Kimmel,
"I had teachers who told me things like, 'If you want to be great you have to learn
how to be drunk and high and still do the play.' [...] So, we tried it [...] drink a little wine,
smoke a little weed, go on stage, and when you get through that, you're kinda confident."
Jackson eventually stepped it up a notch and started dropping acid before his shows,
which resulted in more than a few trippy performances. He elaborated,
"I've been standing in the middle of the stage and
watching my feet sink. [...] You just take your feet up out of the floor,
walk across the stage, and everybody's going, 'Why is he walking like that?'"
Jackson has noted that while he was, quote, "out of my mind a lot of the
time," he tried not to let it harm his acting career. He told The Guardian,
"I was doing things the right way, it was just that one thing that was in the way — my
addiction. And once that was out of the way, it was — boom! The door blew wide open."
Jackson hasn't used drugs since shooting 1991's "Jungle Fever,"
which he admitted was his first time performing completely sober.
You might recognize Joel Kim Booster from his roles in NBC's "Sunnyside,"
Hulu original "Shrill," and the Paramount+ revival of "iCarly," but he's best known for
his work on the stand-up circuit. The Comedy Central regular shared a wild LSD-fueled story
during his appearance on the channel's series "Tales From the Trip." Booster,
who was vacationing at Fire Island at the time, said that his experience started pretty sweet:
"My friend busts out his LSD, which in this case is in the form of Oreos. We pop a few Oreos
and we're like, 'Let's head to the beach, it's our last day, let's enjoy it while we can!'"
The "Oreos" went to work the moment Booster first plunged his hands into the sand.
When hunger struck, the tripping group moved back to their rental in search of snacks,
where they partook in what Booster referred to as,
quote, "the best pineapple I've ever tasted." Booster ended the night by putting on some music
and staring at himself in the mirror. Things got pretty weird from there: he recalled,
"My face started to melt, I started to look old, I started to see myself as a baby."
Fortunately, Booster came out the other side feeling more confident than ever.
When comedian and actor Nick Kroll found out that his friends were renting a big
house in Malibu for an upcoming bachelor party, he decided to,
quote, "[procure] a bunch of mushrooms" for the occasion. In "Have a Good Trip," Kroll
recalled they weren't the only psychoactive substance on the menu that day, either:
"People were smoking salvia, so you knew it's a classy affair."
After divvying up the mushrooms, the group went for a paddle in the sea,
but Kroll made his way back to dry land after he became paranoid about drowning. By this point,
the mushrooms had kicked in big time: Kroll said,
"I'm starting to really roll, I've eaten more mushrooms than everybody else.
I see my buddies, and they're starting to gather a bunch of sea kelp. I see this,
and I'm like, 'I understand what's going to happen.'"
Kroll claimed that his friends covered him in dozens of pounds of the kelp,
which he found just as funny as they did. Calling himself the "kelp monster," Kroll
chased his tripping friends around the beach for a good 45 minutes.
Unfortunately, he woke up the next morning to find himself, quote, "covered in red welts."
Megan Fox met her boyfriend Machine Gun Kelly for the first time at an LA party,
where the actor quickly noticed a familiar odor. She told British GQ,
"I just remember this tall, blond, ghostly creature and I looked up and I was like,
'You smell like weed.' He looked down at me and he was like, 'I am weed.'"
In addition to their pot use, the eccentric couple are among a growing number of celebs
who have tried the trendy psychoactive tea ayahuasca, as Fox revealed during
an appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" The star of "Transformers" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"
admitted to guest host Arsenio Hall that she and her rapper beau visited a special ayahuasca
retreat in Costa Rica, but were expecting a certain level of comfort. She told Hall,
"You get there and you really are in the middle of the jungle."
"Nothing glamorous about it. It's all
a part of, sort of, making you vulnerable, so that you sort of surrender to the experience."
After downing copious amounts of lemongrass tea to induce vomiting,
the empty-stomached pair began their three-night-long ayahuasca journey.
Unfortunately, the second day wasn't a very positive experience for Fox, who said,
"I went to hell for eternity. Just knowing it's eternity is torture in itself,
because there's no beginning, middle, or end […] It just goes straight into your soul,
and it takes you to the psychological prison that you hold yourself in."
Sounds like a chill time.
Comedian and actor Akilah Hughes ended up under the influence after attending a disappointing
gig in New York, she told Comedy Central's "Tales From the Trip." Intent on rescuing the evening,
she and her friends piled into a Williamsburg apartment and promptly dropped some acid. The
LSD seemed to trigger an emotional response in Hughes, who admitted,
"I was on the roof of the building and I just started
ugly crying. It was like Kim Kardashian [when] her diamond earrings had fallen in the ocean."
"My diamond earring
came off in the ocean and it's gone." "Kim, there's people that are dying."
When the wailing began to alarm the building's other residents, the group went inside and
watched TV. At least, most of them did: as Hughes' friends sat down for an episode of
"Freaks and Geeks," she snuck off to the bathroom, where she would remain for approximately an hour.
"I looked in the mirror, and I swear to you, I looked 200 years old. I could see
every hair follicle, the one weird chin hair, every pore. It was harrowing."
Hughes eventually made it back to her friends, who were preparing to eat some oranges, hoping
they would enhance the experience. The taste took Hughes to another world: she remembered,
"I was immediately transported to a '90s Fruit Gushers commercial where
the heads turn into the fruit when they bite into the candy."
Talk about a nostalgia trip.
Sting's day on his English country farm got pretty weird after he decided to try
some dried-out peyote given to him by a friend. As he shared on "Have
a Good Trip," the British singer-songwriter consumed his psychoactive gift before noon,
went for a stroll, and quickly realized that plants were talking to him. He recalled,
"Very quickly, I enter this psychedelic realm. The trees are waving kind of musically at me."
Sting was delighted to star in his own personal Disney movie as he waltzed back to his farm,
but when he arrived, there was a big problem waiting for him. The former Police frontman
was met by the man he'd hired to help run his farm, who told him that one of his cows was
in the middle of a traumatic birth, and she wouldn't survive unless Sting could
provide a helping hand. Unfortunately, this grave news failed to sober him up: he joked,
"As he's speaking, I'm getting more and more high."
Fortunately, the cow had a successful birth thanks to Sting's help. The event
certainly left an impression on the musician, who remembered,
"His mother breathes a sigh of relief,
and for me, the entire universe is cracked open. It was like the meaning of life."
Now, that's moo-velous.
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, please call the Substance Abuse
and Mental Health Administration's 24/7 National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP. That's 1-800-662-4357.