Kieran Culkin claims responsibility for getting Mark Ruffalo high on an off-Broadway stage
In a new interview with The Guardian, Kieran Culkin makes a point of saying that he doesn’t do drugs and never has—with one pretty major exception. In 2000, Culkin performed in The Moment When, an off-Broadway play written by James Lapine. There was apparently a prop spliff in one scene, which Culkin swapped with actual marijuana and didn’t tell anyone. This led to the “entire cast” getting stoned on stage, on the night that critics happened to view the production.
“I was 17 and stupid,” Culkin tells The Guardian. Apparently, there was a bag of prop joints, and the young actor had only swapped out one for the real thing, creating a sort of Russian roulette situation. But instead of brains splattered on the wall behind him, it was the unmistakable smell of reefer that was the tell that the game had ended. Culkin recalls thinking “Uh-oh. I believe it’s happened,” as he watched (and smelled) Mark Ruffalo smoking on stage.
At intermission, though, everyone seemed pretty chill about it. (Perhaps they would have been pretty chill about anything in the moment.) “I’m like, ‘I thought this was a good prank. I’m stupid. Oh my God, I’m so sorry.’ But actually, they loved it,” Culkin recalls. “Mark says, ‘I haven’t smoked pot in 10 years; the second half’s going to be so much fun.’ There was this other actor who had never smoked pot in her life. She goes, ‘Is this what being high is? This is lovely.’ And then Phyllis Newman comes in and goes, ‘I haven’t smoked pot since the 1960s. Thank you, darling.’” Everyone except the (presumably sober) stage manager, that is. “Then the stage manager comes stomping in and goes, ‘I don’t care whose it is, or what happened, but Kieran, give me the joint,” he says. “I sheepishly handed her the roach and she said, ‘Ruin your life on your own time.’”
Funnily enough, Ruffalo has told this story before, back on an appearance on The Graham Norton Show in 2012. Either because he's a gentleman, or maybe because Culkin wasn’t Succession-level famous yet, Ruffalo didn’t name Culkin as the culprit and just referred to a “naughty young actor.” Regardless, he had a pretty good sense of humor about it then, too. “The girl that I was passing it to had never smoked pot in her life,” he recalled. “I had, up to that point, smoked a lot of pot.”
Years later Culkin did This Is Our Youth with Colin Hanks, and joked he would do the same thing to him. Hanks threatened to punch him in the face. But later in the run, he warmed to the idea, and when Culkin did in fact swap the fake weed with the real thing, Hanks apparently got so nervous he couldn’t even roll the joint. Aw! And thus ends Kieran Culkin’s experimentation with drugs.