Nick Offerman revealed that he and his friends in college had an unexpected encounter with police while they were high on marijuana.
The actor, who stars as the president in Alex Garland’s Civil War, told US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel that he and his pals were smoking weed behind a community theatre late one night when flashlights appeared by a nearby creek.
“And we realised it was police, and so we began to tiptoe away and they gave chase and we wisely ran,” Nick said during Tuesday’s edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live.
“And they tackled us, and an incredibly tough, diminutive woman who I think may have been Holly Hunter. I couldn’t tell because she had her boot on my head and she had her gun on me.”
Nick said it “suddenly got incredibly real” after police tackled him and his buds in the parking lot before they learned that a restaurant up the creek was robbed of “a bunch of cash”.
“And they naturally saw these kids running, and we spent the whole night in jail. And the thing is we were just these innocent, dumb theatre kids and we were saying, ‘No, we were just out there smoking and talking, officer,’” the actor said.
He continued: “Thankfully we put up enough of a collective front that they decided we weren’t the thieves. They let us go in the morning, so they kept us all night.”
Nick recalled that as they walked out of the station the next morning, his friend Greg still had “the one-hitter, the pot-smoking paraphernalia”.
“We said, ‘It’s a bummer you had to throw that in the creek when they were chasing us.’ He reached into his crotch and pulled it out and was like, ‘You think I’m gonna throw this thing away?’” Nick said.
“So we smoked marijuana first thing in the morning in Urbana in front of the sheriff’s station and now here I am.”
Nick has previously opened up about his marijuana use before he revealed in 2021 that he stopped as his life was “happy enough”.
“When I depended on marijuana for escapism, I couldn’t get the good stuff, and now that I can afford the most incredible pot, I don’t want it,” he told The Independent.