10 Actors Who Were Inebriated While Filming Major Movie Scenes

Actors are known for their love of partying, often turning up between the pages of the tabloids in unedifying states and poses. Still, sometimes, their predilection for drugs and booze can seep into their work on set. Whether taking method acting to a new level, experimenting with new creative approaches, or merely trying to calm their nerves, there are a few famous faces who have quaffed substances of all kinds before filming some significant scenes.

What if we told you Jack Nicholson was smoking trees around the Easy Rider campfire, that Carrie Fisher enjoyed a different kind of snow on Hoth, or that Margot Robbie had to slam a few shots to bare it all in The Wolf of Wall Street? Despite being inebriated, they got through their scenes—and nobody noticed the difference the first time around. But we will never watch these scenes the same way again.

Related: 10 Actors Who Wanted to Be Killed Off Popular TV Shows

10 Margaret Qualley—The Substance (2024)

French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s body horror The Substance pairs the uncanny with the downright disgusting when Demi Moore’s fading aerobics TV star Elisabeth Sparkle injects herself with a black-market drug, and a younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley) is spawned from her back. This new Elisabeth christens herself Sue and goes about getting the life she thinks she deserves while her old body rots in the bathroom.

She dresses in form-fitting outfits, sleeps with men a fraction of her real age, and snags Elisabeth’s old job. But while Sue is all too comfortable in a skimpy aerobics outfit, Margaret Qualley is not.

For the scene in which Sue leads a hyper-sexual dance class—the scene that makes her an overnight sensation—Qualley had some issues. She was deeply self-conscious about the sequence and learned the dance routine in private. When the day of filming came, she still felt she wasn’t ready, so she “got wasted first thing in the morning,” mixing weed and tequila until she felt confident enough to thrust, gasp, and gyrate exactly how the director wanted.^[1]

9 Omri Katz—Hocus Pocus (1993)

Hocus Pocus brought together movie icons Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy to play witches accidentally resurrected by teenager Max Dennison (Omri Katz) on Halloween night. Over thirty years later, the film is still iconic, mining some magnificent comedy out of its many fantasy and horror elements.

Although Katz was only in his late teens when filming the movie, the young actor had plenty of experience under his belt, having starred as a regular on Dallas for eight years, along with smaller parts in a string of other shows. It should come as no surprise, then, that he was comfortable around the cameras—in this case, a little too comfortable.

Katz had begun experimenting with cannabis, on and off set, and while filming the scene in which Max is struck with a bolt of green magic by Winifred Sanderson (Midler), he was high as a kite. Director Kenny Ortega challenged him directly when he missed his cues and marks, and after getting through the scene, Katz felt this was the wake-up call he needed to clean up his act.^[2]

8 Margot Robbie—The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Martin Scorsese’s crime movie The Wolf of Wall Street scandalized some reviewers and media outlets across America back in 2013, who felt it glorified a decadent and illegal lifestyle. Granted, its subject is Jordan Belfort (played here by Leonardo DiCaprio), a real-life convicted fraudster who swindled people out of millions of dollars using pump-and-dump stock scams.

Opposite DiCaprio is Margot Robbie as Jordan’s hot-headed, blonde bombshell second wife, Naomi Lapaglia. Although the Aussie star slid seamlessly into the role, learning a pitch-perfect Brooklyn accent and meeting every one of Scorsese’s demands, there was one pivotal scene for her character that she had trouble with.

In the scene in which Naomi waits for Jordan fully nude, Robbie is offered an out by Scorsese, but she rejected it, convinced this is what the character would do. Actually shooting it was another matter, and Robbie was so nervous she was visibly shaking, convinced she couldn’t do it. Luckily, a crew member had a flask of tequila on hand, and the actress did three shots before going on camera and baring it all.^[3]

7 Carrie Fisher—The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Widely regarded as the best of all Star Wars movies, The Empire Strikes Back brought back Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher as iconic trio Luke, Han, and Leia, for another adventure in a galaxy far, far away. But this time, the Empire was laying traps, Luke was being put through his paces in Yoda’s Jedi trials, and Han and Leia were falling in love.

For the film’s opening sequence on the ice planet Hoth, where Fisher’s Princess Leia shares a kiss with Ford’s lovable rogue Han Solo, Fisher was high on cocaine. It wasn’t nerves or concerns about her performance that caused the actress to reach for the white powder on set, but a compulsion to remain in a constantly inebriated state. Nonetheless, her performance is near-flawless, and her intoxication doesn’t show in this or any other scene.

This was unfortunately not an isolated episode, as Fisher went on, post-Star Wars, to have a long and unhealthy relationship with drugs, leading a life overshadowed by addiction that included frequent visits to hospital and rehab.^[4]

6 Martin Sheen—Apocalypse Now (1979)

The reputation, money, and critical acclaim Francis Ford Coppola earned from The Godfather allowed him the leeway to pretty much film what he wanted by the late ’70s, and what he wanted to film was Apocalypse Now. An epic, country-spanning Vietnam war movie, Apocalypse Now charts an army mission into Cambodia as a team of U.S. troops attempts to track down and assassinate the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando).

The film hinges on Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen), the already troubled veteran who is tasked with the act of assassinating Kurtz and who loses touch with himself and his purpose in the process. It opens with a crucial establishing scene for Willard, in which the character drinks alone in his hotel room. Going out of his mind, he careens around the room before punching and smashing the mirror.

Sheen drank throughout the film’s production and was drunk when it came time to shoot this scene. When he hit the mirror, it was an accident, but he insisted they keep rolling—and his own blood, covering himself and the bedsheets, wound up in the final cut.^[5]

5 Joey King—The Kissing Booth 3 (2021)

Netflix’s rom-com Kissing Booth trilogy went out with a whimper in 2021 before its stars went on to bigger things. Despite being panned by critics, it hit the right notes with teenage fans, embodying everything young adults look for in this kind of movie—quirky teen romance, awkward high school comedy, and a love triangle.

Kissing Booth 3 sees Elle (Joey King) face the tough decision of whether to attend the college of her boyfriend Noah (Jacob Elordi) or her best friend Lee (Joel Courtney). It all comes to a head during a scene on the boardwalk when Elle and Lee share a confrontation about why she lied about college.

On her last day of filming, King had only seven more shots to do for this scene and figured she could get away with an edible. What she didn’t anticipate was getting “so violently high” that she was barely able to speak. Director Vince Marcello asked if she was feeling okay because she was acting strangely, but this made King tremendously paranoid. She soldiered on through the scene, wrapped the film, and hasn’t looked back since.^[6]

4 Norm Macdonald—Billy Madison (1995)

The ’90s introduced audiences across the globe to Adam Sandler with a string of successful comedies that put the star front and center in several zany, offbeat roles. The first of these was Billy Madison, in which Sandler plays the titular man-child, who is challenged by his father to retake and pass every school grade in 24 weeks, or he won’t inherit the family business.
In his feature film debut, comedic talent Norm Macdonald plays Billy’s best friend, Frank, a similarly lackadaisical wastrel who likes nothing more than to sit by the pool sinking beers. As Macdonald was playing a drunk, he figured he would drink for real, and so he is genuinely inebriated in most of his scenes.

During one scene around the pool—the pool where Billy gets beaten up by Veronica Vaughn (Bridgette Wilson)—when Macdonald was lying drunk on a lounger, Sandler said his line and waited for his co-star’s response. Then he waited some more. It took a while for anyone to realize Macdonald had gotten so into character he had fallen asleep…^[7]

3 Jennifer Lawrence—Passengers (2016)

Morten Tyldum’s sci-fi romance Passengers brought together two of the hottest actors of the time—Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt—but, despite everyone’s best efforts, managed to capture neither the skill nor sex appeal of either star.

In the film, Jim (Pratt) and Aurora (Lawrence) are awakened 90 years early from their induced hibernation on an interstellar spacecraft carrying thousands of people. As the only people awake, the two form a bond and gradually fall in love. And, of course, love tends to arrive with other intimate things…

Passengers marked Lawrence’s first sex scene on screen, having spent the bulk of her career up until then in action-focused roles. As could expected, she was nervous going into such a vulnerable scene and so opted to get “really, really drunk” before appearing on camera. By her own admission, everything was done right, but it was still a bizarre experience. When she arrived home afterward, she couldn’t recall what she had done.^[8]

2 Billy Bob Thornton—Bad Santa (2003)

The anti-Christmas comedy Bad Santa puts country rogue Billy Bob Thornton in the big red suit, stocks him up on booze, and unleashes him upon a society that doesn’t really care for what he has to offer.

Thornton plays crotchety conman Willie Soke, who gets a job as a department store Santa so he and his partner Marcus Skidmore (Tony Cox) can rip off the shopping mall on Christmas Eve. Things don’t quite go to plan, however, when Willie turns up to work drunk, stumbling through gleeful children into Santa’s grotto and tearing the attraction apart.

In preparation, Thornton drank three glasses of red wine for breakfast, then switched to vodka and cranberry and topped it all off with a few Bud Lights. He actually forgot where he was once the cameras were rolling, confused as to why he wasn’t in his house. When the actor caught on to what he was supposed to be doing—destroying the grotto—it was all too easy to stumble over there and make the magic happen.^[9]

1 Jack Nicholson—Easy Rider (1969)

The quintessential 1960s counterculture movie, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, was one of the first major films of the New Hollywood era. Following two bikers, Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Hopper), traveling cross-country with the proceeds from a cocaine deal, we are invited inside the underside of the American South, as they encounter cops, hippies, weirdos, and even Jack Nicholson—a breakout role for the actor, playing freedom-seeking lawyer George Hanson.

By all accounts, the entire cast and crew were partaking in their substances of choice while filming, so it should come as no surprise that the fresh-faced Nicholson was doing his fair share. And, for the crucial campfire scene in which George is introduced to marijuana, he got stoned, really stoned.

Nicholson loved the campfire scene because it allowed him to kick back, relax, and smoke, by his own estimation, “about 155 joints.” So that he didn’t seem blitzed from the get-go, the actor stored it all up, playing the scene as straight as he could and gradually unwinding into his buzz. Thanks to this, the scene feels genuine, just like the film itself, which was made outside the studio system and embodied the kind of lifestyle it portrays.^[10]