Kevin Bacon learned the hard way not to dabble with drugs on set. The actor, who appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers yesterday, shared his story about experiencing a bad high while filming Diner, his 1982 dramedy with Timothy Daly, Mickey Rourke, Steve Guttenberg and Daniel Stern. While the actor described it as “a great experience,” he admitted his smoke break with a co-star on what he thought was his day off gave him a bit of a scare, per People.
Bacon began his story by describing to Meyers his relationship with marijuana. “Different people react differently to it,” Bacon said. “I’m okay as long as I’m in a super, super safe kind of situation … I need to be like in bed, or something’s on. Like work, never, never, never… otherwise I can get a little paranoid.
“So we had a day off while we’re doing Diner,” Bacon explained. “And it’s definitely a day off on the schedule, so another actor — I don’t want to mention his name since there’s drugs involved — but Danny Stern says to me, ‘Do you wanna go to the movies and get high? We’ll get high and go to the movies.’ So I was like, ‘Yeah, definitely. We’re not working today, awesome.’”
While Stern and Bacon headed off the the movies, nobody knew where they had gone. After all, it was pre-Find My Friends era. “We’re in Baltimore in the middle of the afternoon watching whatever movie would be the popular movie back then … and all of a sudden it’s dark and we’re watching the movie and I hear someone go, ‘Is Kevin Bacon here in the theater? Is there a Kevin Bacon in the theater?,’” Bacon recalled. “I was like, what is happening? And sure enough, the production, they needed me. And I don’t think they needed Danny, so he’s cracking up, he’s hysterical, laughing at the fact that I’ve gotta go back.
“They had somehow tracked us down, somebody had told somebody that we were going to go the movies and they went to every single movie theater in Baltimore and found us and I went back to work and I was fine, it turned out that the scene was just me walking in the background or something like that. Plus the adrenaline just straightened me right up,” Bacon said.
After hearing the whole story, Meyers called the experience a “nightmare,” adding, “if you’re someone who gets paranoid smoking weed, the nightmare is someone will come in and literally scream your name.”
Since that fateful day filming Diner, Bacon has learned a valuable lesson: “Any kind of drug just doesn’t go with work.”
Where to watch Diner