Anna Kendrick wants you to know she doesn’t condone the use of illegal drugs.
So when she shared a story about her first time doing mushrooms on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert — no, she didn’t do the mushrooms on air, as cool as that might be — Kendrick emphasized that her story is “for entertainment purposes only.” I’d argue it’s also a testament of her friendship with fellow entertainer Brittany Snow, who took one for the team when Kendrick’s trip turned out to be more than she expected.
The Pitch Perfect pair were at a Halloween party when they were asked if they wanted to try microdosing mushrooms. “That’s a thing people do,” Kendrick told Colbert. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, you know, I’m fun.’ And that’s how you know you’re fun, when you have to say it to a crowd,” she quipped, prompting a few laughs from the audience.
“What does that mean by the way,” Colbert asked Kendrick to explain how one microdoses mushrooms. “You’re taking a pill?” Kendrick answered that she was given a square of chocolate and cautiously ate half of her square, hoping to make her microdose even more micro. She soon learned that chocolate and mushrooms aren’t necessarily the best combination.
“Sometimes it doesn’t mix properly and sometimes there can be one little bite that doesn’t have a micro-dose, it has a real macrodose,” she told Colbert. She realized she had bitten off more than she could chew when she started “tripping balls.”
“I start saying, ‘Oh no, I’m so high. Oh God I’m so high,'” Kendrick recalled, “and I just can’t stop saying it.” This is when Snow came to the rescue. When she realized how high Kendrick was, she, “like a hero, just took a bunch more mushrooms” so Kendrick wouldn’t be left alone on her trip.
“So then just the two of us are in the corner of this party, staring at each other, grinning like the Joker while streaming tears. But we felt great.” Kendrick and Snow then took turns telling each other how beautiful and talented they thought the other was. “I was like, ‘You’re a creative genius’ and I told her she should remake the film Chinatown,” Kendrick said of her “big revelations from mushrooms.”
Kendrick came on the show to promote her directorial debut Woman of the Hour, a true crime thriller based on real-life serial killer Rodney Alcala, who appeared on The Dating Game in 1978 during his killing spree. Kendrick plays Cheryl Bradshaw, an aspiring actress who starred on the show at her agent’s request.
Like in the real episode of the show, Bradshaw chooses Alcala out of the lineup to go on a date with her but has reservations about following through after she feels something’s off. The film is garnering rave reviews from critics for its exploration of the misogynistic culture that allows killers like Alcala to get away with their crimes as well as its focus on humanizing his victims.
Like Kendrick, Snow recently made her directorial debut with the 2023 film Parachute. Since we know she has the skills, I personally would love to see Snow direct a remake of Chinatown. Kendrick was really on to something with that mushroom-inspired revelation. Jokes aside, hopefully we’ll see the two friends will work on another project they direct together in the future. Perhaps a stoner comedy inspired by their Halloween trip is in the cards?