Bryan Cranston isn’t a psilocybin user; he just plays one on TV. Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live!last week, the actor said he and Catherine O’Hara tried microdosing ahead of their roles on The Studio.
Fans of the Apple TV+ comedy will recall — spoiler alert! — that Griffin Mill, Cranston’s studio chief, had a bad trip in Las Vegas ahead of his CinemaCon presentation.
“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 Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday. “So I was asking [The Studio costars] Seth Rogen and Ike Barinholtz, ‘You guys are huge druggies! What can you tell me?’”
Rogen and Barinholtz, who are also two of The Studio’s creators, suggested microdosing as a starting point.
“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. “If God wasn’t telling me to do microdosing, what was he telling me?”
Cranston said he and O’Hara were “nervous” and “clutching each other” as they weighed whether they’d actually go through with it, but Barinholtz assured them the experience was “not gonna be anything.”
Ultimately, Barinholtz gave Cranston and O’Hara “these little, thin, square chocolates,” and Cranston consumed half of one of the wafers.
“I took it — nothing,” the actor said. “I didn’t feel anything.”
And consuming a bit more didn’t help. “It felt like maybe I took three sips of wine. It was nothing! Nothing!” Cranston said.
“So you really are a great actor, it turns out, because that was all acting,” Kimmel said of the tripping scene in The Studio.
“It was acting. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
That acting wowed Emmy voters: Cranston picked up his seventh Emmy trophy last weekend, winning the Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series at the 77th Creative Arts Emmys for his Studio performance.
The Studio, Season 1 Streaming Now, Apple TV+
Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Weeknights, 11:35/10:35c, ABC