With Bad Trip now available on Netflix, star Eric Andre is opening up about the Borat-esque filming of his latest comedy and how one scene in particular got a little too real for his co-star Lil Rel Howery. According to Andre, the duo’s first prank went wrong almost right from the jump as the two entered an Atlanta barbershop while attached at the crotch by a Chinese finger trap. When they asked for help from the barber (who had no idea what was going on thanks to the film’s hidden camera approach), he pulled a knife and chased them out of the store. Via USA Today:
“Part of my brain was like, ‘Wow, I could die right now.’ Another part of my brain goes, ‘This is going to be great footage,” says André, 37, speaking by Zoom from his Los Angeles home. “I felt the movie needed a couple of death-defying scenes to give it real stakes. To make it feel raw and intense.”
While Andre was thrilled with the visceral reaction and how it would look in the final product, Howery was not. The actor quit the production right then and there. “He walked from the movie, we had to seduce him back,” Andre told USA Today. After the beefing up of security, Howery not only returned to the film, but he somehow roped his The Carmichael Show co-star, Tiffany Haddish, into joining the film. Her escapee character ended up being one of the highlights of Bad Trip, according to Uproxx‘s Vince Mancini.
“It helps that Haddish herself is also genius, with a Sacha Cohen-esque facility for improvising and an uncanny ability to insert perfectly-timed, perfectly-crafted one-liners into high-risk situations,” Mancini writes. “She’s either raising the stakes of a situation by adding a new complication or adding in an element of the absurd, sometimes both.”
(Via USA Today)