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It’s no secret that many actors like to smoke weed. Naturally, some actors have famously smoked during the production of movies, especially stoner comedies. However, weed use in movies goes deeper than that, and there are some great stories of actors getting high on set, which you can enjoy below.
Ethan Embry – Can’t Hardly Wait
Frankly, this entry surprised me. Out of all the actors in the 1998 comedy Can’t Hardly Wait, Ethan Embry seems like the one least likely to smoke weed. Or maybe I always identified him as the innocent kid in 1991’s All I Want for Christmas or the random jackoff in Ridley Scott’s Dead Poet Society knockoff White Squall.
At any rate, according to Embry, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he was “the world’s biggest stoner” during the filming of Can’t Hardly Wait. He can’t hardly remember the movie at all, which sucks for him, considering he makes out with the adorable Jennifer Love Hewitt. “I was a smoker and the world’s biggest pothead and probably smelled like a walking ashtray.”
Kirsten Dunst – Woodshock
While most actors on this list got stoned for fun, Kirsten Dunst was the target of an onset joke. During the filming of the stoner drama Woodshock, Dunst smoked fake pot made out of tobacco or oregano. One day, the crew decided to roll a joint made of actual marijuana, which Dunst took, not knowing the contents. The actress recalled the incident to Jimmy Kimmel, explaining how she started flipping out. “I was crying, laughing, eating a peanut butter sandwich. I couldn’t film anymore, they sent me home! I was a total mess!” Dunst said. “I’ve never been that stoned in my entire life!”
As it turns out, she smoked an entire blunt filled with Humboldt weed, which is … well, really strong. Check out the full interview and marvel at how the actress turns the peculiar event into a funny comedy bit.
Jason Mewes – Clerks
I doubt anyone is shocked to learn that Jason Mewes was stoned and/or drunk while filming Clerks. After all, his character, Jay, is a notorious pothead, prone to outrageous (and often insightful) rants about pop culture, sex, and society. By his admission, in an interview with Metro, Mewes smoked weed on set. “Yes,” he said, “the whole time—I was either drinking or smoking the whole time.”
That only adds to his character’s charm.
Funny enough, when Mallrats rolled around, Mewes was much more behaved. “I didn’t even drink or anything – the studio were really strict and it was my first studio acting gig. Clerks was just a bunch of friends making a movie – but the studio had me audition for my character for Mallrats.
“They had Seth Green on standby in case I didn’t get the audition – I didn’t want to [risk it].”
Jim Breuer – Half Baked
Given the subject matter, I’m surprised the cast of Half Baked wasn’t high throughout. Everyone behaved during the filming, including Jim Breuer, who took the gig seriously and never got stoned on set—except for once.
The comedian explained that he was sent home for the day after filming, an order he happily followed. When he got to his trailer, he found a joint delivered by Dave Chappelle waiting for him. “Well, I got no kids and responsibilities right now, so I’ll give it a shot,” Breuer explained during a standup routine. Long story short, he got buzzed.
Naturally, a producer showed up and explained that he needed to return to the set to shoot more scenes. Uh-oh. Funny enough, all he had to do in the scene was step over Samson (Clarence Williams III) and say, “Sucks to be you.” Of course, he had a tough go with the scene due to his current mental state, to the point that Chappelle told him to get it together.
Jack Nicholson – Easy Rider
Legendary actor Jack Nicholson starred in some of the greatest films of all time, including the road trip drama Easy Rider, in which he, Peter Fonda, and Dennis Hopper ride around the country on motorcycles, get high, and discuss life. Naturally, during filming, everyone had their drug of choice, according to Peter Fonda. “Dennis had his drink, Jack smoked joints, and the crew dabbled with acid and dope,” the legendary actor told Cinephilia & Beyond.
Well, Nicholson and company took the method acting a little too far during the infamous campfire sequence. “We were all stoned the night we shot the campfire scene. The speech about the UFOs looks improvised, but it was actually almost verbatim from the script. The story about me smoking 155 joints—that’s a little exaggerated. But each time I did a take or an angle, it involved smoking almost an entire joint. After the first take or two, the acting job became reversed. Instead of being straight and having to act stoned at the end, I was now stoned at the beginning and having to act straight, and then gradually letting myself return to where I was—which was very stoned.”
Gunnar Hansen – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a nightmare-inducing classic capable of freaking out the most ardent horror buffs. It’s weird, raw, and delightfully unhinged and features one of the cinema’s greatest baddies—the chainsaw-toting Leatherface, memorably portrayed by Gunnar Hansen. As it turns out, to get in character, Hansen would occasionally kick back a brownie or two.
During a pivotal scene where Leatherface chases Sally (Marilyn Burns) and cuts his way through a door using a real chainsaw, “Hansen scarfed down a few brownies someone had passed out earlier, not realizing they were special brownies, according to Vulture. The actor didn’t feel the effects until filming commenced, which caused him to struggle during the scene. With a chainsaw. Luckily, no one was hurt, the drugs eventually wore off, and filming continued without much fuss.
“I trust Gunnar 100 percent,” Burns said later. “But not Gunnar on brownies, with a chainsaw, running up the steps, take forty-four, oh no.” That’s perfectly understandable.
Josh Duhamel – Spaceman
In a similar case to Kirsten Dunst, Josh Duhamel accidentally smoked weed on the Spaceman set. “The truth is the first day, the first shot of the movie, I was rolling a joint,” he admitted to E! News. “Normally, they make fake weed, but nobody told me it was real weed,” he said. “So I smoked it, and for the next several hours, I was high and wasn’t supposed to be.”
The actor was high for the next several hours but was able to shake off the drug’s effects and resume filming. Spaceman seems to have flown under the radar for many, myself included, until writing this article. Whether Duhamel filmed the entire movie in an altered state or not, it’s doubtful it would have made much of a difference given its obscurity and 0% Rotten Tomatoes score.
Michael Rapaport – True Romance
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Tony Scott’s True Romance is a masterpiece, a wickedly entertaining story about love, violence, and everything in between starring Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, and a slew of talented actors appearing in bite-sized cameos—notably, the great Michael Rapaport as Slater’s best friend, Dick Ritchie.
In a memorable bit, Slater, Arquette, Rapaport, and Bronson Pinchot board a rollercoaster while discussing a drug shipment. According to Scott, in an interview with Maxim, Rapaport was high during filming, but only because he was scared. “The roller-coaster scene was difficult. Pinchot was shitting himself, and Rapaport was so scared that he dropped a bunch of Quaaludes and couldn’t say his lines.” Somehow, that makes the scene even funnier.
Wesley Snipes – Blade: Trinity
This entry is a little trickier since it’s not explicitly stated that Wesley Snipes was high on the Blade: Trinity set. However, co-star Patton Oswalt told AV Club that Snipes was difficult throughout filming and spent all day sitting in his trailer smoking weed, only appearing on camera for close-ups. His stand-in did the rest.
“It was just one of those; it was a very troubled production,” Oswalt said. “Wesley [Snipes] was just fucking crazy in a hilarious way. He wouldn’t come out of his trailer, and he would smoke weed all day. Which is fine with me, because I had all these DVDs that I wanted to catch up on.”
To be fair, Blade: Trinity is awful, so maybe Snipes was merely making the best of a bad situation. Weed can certainly help with that.
Seth Rogen – Everything
Finally, Seth Rogen made a career out of playing weed-smoking heroes. Except for perhaps his roles in animated hits like Kung Fu Panda or Monsters vs. Aliens, Seth Rogen’s characters are rarely far from a blunt – both literally and figuratively. Even then, it’s hard to say for sure.
Of course, the actor is candid about his love of weed, telling The Irish Times that he has been high for nearly every movie scene he appears in. “In general,” Rogen says, “there is no amount of weed that I can smoke that will make the average person be able to discern that I have or have not smoked weed.”
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