We’ll never ever tire of saying it: drug use must be responsible and safe, both for the user and those around them. And you should always, always label your substances properly. Such a lesson was learned the hard way by none other than Zoë Kravitz. The American actress, director, and singer had already mentioned using weed on the regular, but she has also talked about another mind-bending substance.
In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, she and her co-star Austin Butler took a lie detector test to promote their new film, Caught Stealing. One of the questions Kravitz asked was if she had ever accidentally taken hallucinogens. Her answer? No… “But I have accidentally dosed several people.”
How so? Turns out, the filmmaker usually has two things on hand: magic mushroom-infused chocolates in her fridge, and friends who take things from said fridge without asking. An explosive combination indeed. “It’s happened like four times,” Kravitz confessed.
On one of those occasions, the actress was filming Batman when a friend visited from Paris and decided to snack on the chocolates in Kravitz’s refrigerator. “She called me, and I had to leave work and take care of her,” she explained. “And then a month later, it happened again, with another friend.”
“Now I label everything,” the filmmaker assures. “But I also think you don’t go into people’s fridges and just eat unmarked chocolate.” Hard to argue with that.
Zoe Kravitz and Magic Mushrooms: A Long Time Ship
So how did this whole shroom talk even come up? At another point in the interview, her role playing herself in the satirical series The Studio is mentioned. In one episode, she’s seen accidentally taking too many shrooms and having an understandably bad trip.
Is it possible she was inspired by her friends’ experiences to portray the situation? We can’t know for sure, but the actress did tell Variety that “it had been a while since I had taken mushrooms, so I was just remembering that and really trying to make it as accurate as possible.”
“Mushrooms are so specific. And then, the rest of this is about letting go and being free. And the whole point, actually, is that you are not in control when you’re tripping,” added Kravitz, who seems to have a well-grounded relationship with shrooms, and to know what she’s talking about. She also described a scene where she’s seen building “a fort and I’m holding French fries, making crazy animal noises and rolling around.” A mushroom trip through and through.
However, while she was portraying herself as a character, she wasn’t necessarily portraying reality. Under Vanity Fair’s polygraph, the actress confessed that if this had happened to her in real life, she would have “freaked out” much more than what we saw on screen. In fact, she played it real cool on purpose, partly to serve as contrast to Dave Franco’s wild performance. “I thought, ‘The more serious and the more chill I am, the funnier it will be,’” she’d told Variety. “It was so fun.”
No wonder she ranks Burning Man as one of her top three parties ever, where psychedelics flow as freely as the music.
The moral is clear, kids: for a good trip with psychedelics, proper dosage and awareness of what you’re taking are key.
Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
