The wildest celebrity acid trip stories in Have a Good Trip
Want the chance to feel like you're tripping acid with the late Carrie Fisher or Anthony Bourdain?
Netflix has just dropped the documentary Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics, in which several stars are interviewed at length about what it was like to take psychedelics when they were younger. It's the best communal experience you can get, this side of the pandemic.
Stories from Sting, Ben Stiller, Rosie Perez, Sarah Silverman, and many more take you down into their most whimsical experiences talking to an acorn, as one does, to near-death experiences, like being stranded in a desert with a popped tire (courtesy of Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys). This is all while you're watching acid-dipped animation or live-action reenactments that will make you close to a trip without ever taking a single dose.
Some of their hallucinations are so unimaginable without hearing the details themselves, so EW has broken down three of the best stories from the doc to never read to your child at bedtime.
Anthony Bourdain
The famed chef and travel documentarian starts out his story by telling us how much he was "enthralled with Hunter S. Thompson" as a kid. Thompson was a journalist from the '60s and '70s that was known to let drugs fuel his word count. Bourdain wanted to not only live out a legendary drug trip of his but "survive it."
Cue the road trip, reenacted by comedians Adam Devine and Blake Anderson. Bourdain and his friend, who only had a learner's permit at the time, decided to pack a car with LSD, weed, Lebanese hash, gin, beer, and quaaludes. The bare necessities.
They're driving off to the Catskills when they pick up two attractive women. "They were exotic dancers. One of them identified herself as Panama Red," Bourdain recalls. So they decide to take a detour to one of the girl's homes, where one of them out of the blue collapses to the ground after taking two "industrial-strength" quaalude. He thinks he's going to jail. He thinks he's definitely a murderer for life now. At least for the hottest minute, until she gets back up like nothing happened. The end.
Carrie Fisher
Fisher's acid story takes us to her early Star Wars days, right in the most public place imaginable, Central Park in New York City. The first thing Fisher remembers of her trip is holding onto the ground, "because it was hard to stay on the planet."
"I'm watching an acorn. It gets moving along. I never saw things that weren't there. I just saw things that were there, misbehave," Fisher explains.
Fleabag's annoying husband Brett Gelman plays the part of the acorn in the reenactment. The acorn begins to tell her how much of a fan it is of her work. Then, the acorn decides to perform a fully choreographed dance. Gelman performs "I'm a Nut," which is equal parts vaudeville and insane.
Ben Stiller
"In retrospect, I didn't realize how much it was going to change my life. Because it changed my life for a long time," Stiller starts out his story by saying. Stiller had recently watched the 1979 hippie musical Hair and figured he wanted the same "opening to some other form of consciousness."
Stiller had none of that when he had his trip, which he just remembers being afraid and paranoid. He remembers staring at his hand "pondering what my hand was." Then he realized he had not only no idea where he was, but what reality was to begin with. So naturally, you call your father, the late Jerry Stiller.
Jerry was filming episodes of Love Boat at the time. Ben completely opened up and said he had taken acid. Jerry says "I understand what you're doing through. When I was 10 years old I smoked a Pall Mall cigarette and I was sick for two days." Ben made it clear that wasn't close to his experience at all, so Jerry did the best he could do and gave him a "it's going to be okay." Awh.
Watch Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics on Netflix now.
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