Seeing Eddie Murphy play more than a half-dozen characters—including the Richard Simmons-esque Lance Perkins—in The Nutty Professor could be psychologically jarring to a lot of people. Now imagine having to be in the center of all that comedy mania after a heavy night of partying with booze, weed, and ‘a bad batch of ecstasy.’ Welcome to Jada Pinkett’s world circa 1996.
On the latest episode of Red Table Talk, her Facebook Watch show, the topic was the growing concerns of young women abusing alcohol—even more so since the beginning of the pandemic—and Pinkett Smith had a whopper of a tale to tell about her own party girl days. While filming 1996’s The Nutty Professor, the actor/host admitted that she “went to work high, and it was a bad batch of ecstasy, and I passed out. And I told everybody that … I must have had old medication in a vitamin bottle.”
While that might be the MDMA version of the “the dog ate my homework” excuse, it turned out to be a wake-up call for the actor. After arousing from her drug-induced slumber—which probably wasn’t helped by adding in alcohol and weed, a hat trick of substances that she says was her “cocktail” of choice in those days—Pinkett Smith could have found some way to shirk her filming duties for the rest of the day. “But I tell you what I did though,” she said. “Got my ass together and got on that set. That was the last time.”
Pinkett Smith said that telling herself that what she was taking was “harmless” was how she justified her overindulgence in drugs and alcohol at the time:
“I was like, this is not cocaine. This is not heroin. I wasn’t doing things that I thought was addictive, but I would do those three together. That was my cocktail. Your threshold becomes so high that what it takes for you to get to the place you need to get to … it’ll take me two bottles to get to ‘OK, if I do ecstasy, alcohol and weed at the same time, I’m gonna get there faster and I can keep the high going,’ because then I can just keep drinking. Because I know ecstasy’s gonna last me about three, four, five hours. The weed, you know, that’s just going to keep me just smooth, and then the alcohol’s gonna keep it going. I can just keep taking drink, drink, drink.”
The Nutty Professor incident wasn’t really even the worst thing that happened to Pinkett Smith. She also recalled who she was once “throwing all up over” Debbie Allen’s house during her days on A Different World. Good times.
Still, Pinkett Smith said it took hitting “rock bottom” for her to realize her partying ways were causing a problem. “Literally, I got it quick,” she said. “Once I was going for that third bottle of wine, I said, ‘You’ve got a problem,’ and it was cold turkey that day.”
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(Via Yahoo! Entertainment)