Finn Wolfhard recounts real-life attempted robbery while directing burglar scene in short film

Things got meta on set of "Night Shifts."

Finn Wolfhard's directorial short debut got a little too meta.

The Stranger Things star, 21, joined Sean Evans for a round of spicy wings on Thursday's new episode of Hot Ones, where he recounted the time he and his film crew were involved in a real-life attempted robbery while filming a scene in his 2020 short Night Shifts that encompassed the very same crime.

The short has a kooky premise: a masked robber tries to hold up a convenience store, only to discover that the man behind the counter is an old pal. They spend some time reconnecting, and when a police officer arrives, he, too, is an old friend of the two. It stars Malcolm Sparrow-Crawford and Wolfhard's Ghostbusters: Afterlife costars Artoun Nazareth and Billy Bryk. The attempted robbery occurred while Wolfhard was directing Nazareth as the fictional burglar.

"While we were shooting the robbery scene, a guy came in with a fake . . . he like welded a fake gun together. It was the weirdest thing ever," Wolfhard recalled to Evans. "He came in brandishing this fake gun and Artoun, the guy who is playing the burglar, turned around with his fake gun, and they were just pointing fake guns at each other like a standoff."

"I was sitting there directing. I was like, 'What's going on?' I peaked out and saw this standoff happening." Wolfhard recounted. The real attempted robber eventually left, and because Wolfhard was so deep in the directorial zone, "I was like, cool, let's move on," he said, "And everyone was like, no! What the f--- just happened?" He added, "It was nuts."

Nazareth recounted the ordeal in a conversation with Sonder Magazine in 2021, noting that the man was in the store for about "five seconds, but it felt so much longer for how much was going on." He said, "I have the prop gun in my hands and then the door opens. Obviously, I'm not thinking, yeah, let me stop this guy and point my gun at him, and it looks like he’s pointing something at me, so I move towards him and I’m thinking to myself, 'Does he have a gun? No, I don’t think so. What’s happening?'"

"Finn and the rest of the crew couldn’t be around the area I was being shot in for the scene, so they didn’t see him come in," he added. "I didn’t really know what was going on regardless because it’s not like he came in and said 'I’m robbing the place,' and then he just left! Of course, it's nothing to joke about, there are shootings going on regularly in this country and it's scary, but it was such a weird, shocking little moment."

Check out Wolfhard's short below, and the rest of his Hot Ones interview above.

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