Acting under the influence: stars who were on drink and drugs when they made their movies
Kevin Spacey (American Beauty)
In retrospect, we probably should have guessed from the footage – but director Sam Mendes once revealed that, during the making of American Beauty, he may have allowed Lester Burham actor Kevin Spacey to get stoned “for real”, in to heighten the realism of the film’s drug-taking.
“There's a scene in American Beauty where he and Wes Bentley's character are getting stoned outside a real estate convention,” Mendes told an audience at the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye. “There may or may not have been real pot available on that particular evening, I couldn't comment.”
“At one point Kevin got the giggles as you might imagine would happen. He got helpless with laughter out of nowhere and his eyes flick over just to the left of the camera because he's looking for me to say "don't giggle, it's not what I want you to But I said "keep going" because I just thought it was magic. And he kept going and that was absolutely the movie.”
Robert Shaw (Jaws)
Steven Spielberg didn’t just have to contend with a badly behaved mechanical shark during the making of Jaws: he also had an intoxicated Robert Shaw to deal with. On one occasion, ahead of the filming of his famous “sinking of the Indianopolis” speech, Shaw drank so much that he had to be carried on to the set, and later blacked out.
Filming was cut short – but the actor made up for it the following day, when he nailed Quint’s speech, and helped turn it into one of cinema’s most memorable (not to mention chilling) monologues.
Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor battled alcoholism and painkiller addiction throughout her life, and was often drunk during filming – especially on the set of some of later movies. In a 1983 diary entry, her former husband Richard Burton, who was starring alongside Taylor in a stage play, wrote: “ET impossibly sloshed all day long. So much so she couldn’t even read the lines”.
Richard Burton
Like many “old school” actors, Richard Burton (who was twice-married to actress Elizabeth Taylor) was a hard-drinking man, renowned for his ability to put away considerable – and, ultimately deadly – quantities of booze.
“I am fundamentally so bored with my job that only drink is capable of killing the pain,” he wrote in a 1969 diary entry. “The thought of doing a whole day’s work with, for instance, John Colicos [fellow actor], which is my chore tomorrow, without at least half a bottle of vodka to ease back the yawns is like deliberately inciting a nightmare.”
By the time he made Under Milk Wood, in 1972, Burton was vowing to be “sober” on set – or at least his definition of sober.
“I am not drinking on your film,” he told director Andrew Sinclair. “That means only one bottle of vodka a day. I'm sober on two, but when I'm drinking, it is three or more.” Burton went on to suffer from cirrhosis of the liver and kidney disease, and died of a brain haemorrhage in 1984, aged 58.
Jack Nicholson (Easy Rider)
Easy Rider will never be considered one of cinema's most sober films. In fact, in comparison to its star and director Peter Fonda, Nicholson was relatively restrained on set. But the whole cast were involved in imbibing real substances in this 1969 film about the world's most inebriated era.
Nicholson recalled filming a scene of existentialist chatter around the campfire as such: "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."
The Beatles
It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for Richard Lester, the director of A Hard Day’s Night and Help: during the latter film, the fab four, who had recently discovered marijuana, apparently kept sneaking off to get stoned.
“In one of the scenes, Victor Spinetti and Roy Kinnear are playing curling: sliding along those big stones,” Ringo Starr later recalled. “One of the stones has a bomb in it and we find out that it’s going to blow up, and have to run away. Well, Paul and I ran about seven miles, we ran and ran, just so we could stop and have a joint before we came back. We could have run all the way to Switzerland.”
Daniel Radcliffe (in the latter Harry Potter films)
It's hard being the most famous boy wizard in the world, as Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter, found out. The child actor went on nightly drinking binges during the filming of the later Harry Potter movies.
Although he admits that he never consumed alcohol on the set, he "went into work still drunk". "I can point to many scenes where I'm just gone," he told Heat Magazine in 2012, "dead behind the eyes."
Apocalypse Now
Super-tanned Californian surfer turned soldier Lance B Johnson takes cannabis and acid during Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam movie Apocalypse Now. But the actor behind the character, Sam Bottoms, was also high throughout shooting– reportedly on speed and marijuana, although some sources suggest he made like his character and took LSD as well. That said, Bottoms's on-set antics probably just added to the film’s dangerous, intensely trippy atmosphere.
Carrie Fisher (Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back)
The Princess Leia actress has never held back when it comes to telling stories of her drug and alcohol use while filming the original Star Wars trilogy, but there was one scene which has gone down in Lucasfilm legend. While working on The Empire Strikes Back, Fisher was renting out Eric Idle's home. Sometimes, the Monty Python member would let himself in, and on one occasion, he did so with The Rolling Stones.
Fisher, who at the time had stopped drinking, fell off the wagon to "be kind of amenable" to the rock stars, and, along with co-star Harrison Ford, ended up staying awake so late they didn't bother sleeping before their early call. "We weren’t hung over," she recalled at the 2015 Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim, "We were still in our cups. And if you watch the movie you can see that: Harrison and I are smiling as we arrived in Cloud City. Doesn’t that sound like a euphemism?"
More recently, Eric Idle has admitted that Fisher and Ford weren't exactly drunk: "We went to bed and they went to work," he says It turns out when they filmed the scene, they were still a little high.
John Belushi (The Blues Brothers)
Apparently, most of the cast of The Blues Brothers were on drugs at some point during filming (Dan Aykroyd even admitted they had a separate budget for cocaine during night time shoots) but no actor fully committed to being high quite like John Belushi who regularly took cocaine in the middle of the day. Belushi would disappear for hours on end during filming, and on one occasion, Aykroyd found him in a stranger’s house.
Another time, director John Landis walked into the actor’s trailer to find him perched behind a literal mountain of cocaine – which was soon disposed of down a lavatory. Eventually, Belushi hired a bodyguard whose sole purpose was to keep him from getting high during filming.
Peter O’Toole
Peter O’Toole was known for his hell raising antics, particularly during his Sixties heyday, and was even drunk during the filming of his breakthrough film Lawrence of Arabia. In 1992, O’Toole admitted that he and co-star Omar Sharif got drunk before a big a camel riding scene, then tied themselves down to the camels before filming. Apparently, he was so drunk that he had no idea where he was or what he was doing.
Another famous incident was when the shooting The Lion in Winter, O'Toole cut off the top of his finger in a boating accident. He dropped the finger in some brandy before pushing it back into place and wrapping with a bandage. Removing the bandage weeks later he found he'd put it back the wrong way round.
Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey Bogart was another actor famed for his love of a strong drink, both on and off-screen – something which his The African Queen co-star Katherine Hepburn was disgusted at. However, Bogart and drinking buddy John Huston, who directed the film, were the only ones not to contract dysentery from contaminated water during the shoot – because they only ever drank whiskey.
Gunnar Hansen (in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface is one of the most memorable movie villains of the 20th century: a demented, terrifying killer, with an unnerving childishness, and a knack for for getting under other people’s skin. Just in case that’s not scary enough, he was also on drugs. On the final night of filming, the cast and crew of Tobe Hooper’s iconic Seventies horror flick tucked into a batch of marijuana-laced brownies.
But Gunnar Hansen, the 6ft 4in actor playing Leatherface, had never experienced the drug before. Shortly after eating the cakes – and while battling dizziness – he had to film a scene in which Leatherface chainsaws through a front door. Luckily for everyone in the vicinity, he managed to keep the saw on the door.
Judy Garland
MGM Studios famously placed Garland on a starvation diet of black coffee, chicken soup and cigarettes, to ensure the child star remained slim. But during the filming of The Wizard of Oz, poor Garland was also being medicated with a mixture of amphetamines and barbitutes, to enable her to get through filming while maintaining a restricted diet.
The actress and singer would go on to face a lifelong battle with drugs and alcohol addiction, finally dying of an overdose at the age of 47.
Gary Oldman – Bram Stoker’s Dracula
During the filming of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oldman was picked up by the police for driving while drunk, and later received a six month ban. But was he ever actually drunk on set? Various sources have claimed that the star was well over the legal limit during the scene in which he licks blood off a razor belonging to Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves).
