When Bryan Cranston Took Shrooms With Catherine O’Hara

Once upon a time, Bryan Cranston and Catherine O’Hara took mushrooms and went to a Grateful Dead concert in Las Vegas.

It’s a memory Cranston shared when stopping by Jimmy Kimmel Live! in September, and one some fans are looking back at fondly following news of O’Hara’s death on Friday, Jan. 30, at the age of 71.

Before you get too excited about any tripped out details, it was all in the name of Hollywood. Or so, Cranston says. The actor recalled taking the drug to prepare for his scene as Continental Studios CEO Griffin Mill in Seth Rogan’s The Studio. In the show, the studio exec gets high on mushroom chocolates and things get chaotic quickly. However, the real world issue was that Cranston had never taken the drug himself.

“I’m playing this character who is wiped out and I had never had any experience in that. Not many drugs at all, as a matter of fact, and so I didn’t know really how to behave,” Cranston told host Kimmel. “So I was asking Seth Rogen and Ike Barinholtz, ‘You guys are huge druggies! What can you tell me?’” he continued, adding that they recommended microdosing at first.

“We were in Las Vegas shooting this crazy show with Seth Rogen and we all decided to go to the Sphere to see the Grateful Dead,” Cranston said, before concluding: “If God wasn’t telling me to do microdosing, what was he telling me?”

Soon, O’Hara joined in the effort, but not without hesitation. Cranston said that they were “nervous” and “clutching each other,” despite Barinholtz assuring them he’d take care of the duo. Eventually, Cranston said they were given “thin square chocolates,” but the result was anti-climatic. “I took it. Nothing. I didn’t feel anything,” said the actor. “It felt like maybe I took three sips of wine.”

As for O’Hara’s Las Vegas experience, that’s a story for another time.