Nick Offerman opened up to Jimmy Kimmel about an incident he had as a teen, where he recalled spending a “whole night” in jail with some friends after smoking marijuana.
During an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! this week (April 17), Offerman quipped that he was “the douchebag” in a family of “exemplary citizens.”
“I experimented with misdemeanors when I was young,” said the Parks and Recreation star, before telling the story of how he and his friends were mistaken for robbers.
“Some friends and I, we can say this now, in California, we were smoking marijuana out behind a community theatre late one night. And some flashlights came along the creek where we were hanging out, and we realized it was the police, and so we began to tiptoe away, and they gave chase, and we wisely ran,” Offerman explained.
“And they tackled us and an incredibly tough, diminutive woman who I think may have been Holly Hunter,” he joked, referring to his Paradise co-star, “had her boot on my head and she had her gun on me.”
He continued: “It turned out that a restaurant had been robbed of a bunch of cash up the creek. And they naturally saw these kids running, and we spent the whole night in jail. And the thing is, we were just these innocent, dumb theatre kids, and we were saying, ‘No, we were just out there smoking and talking, officer.’
“Thankfully, we put up enough of a collective front that they decided we weren’t the thieves. They let us go in the morning, so they kept us all night.
“As the sun was coming up, we walked out, and on the front lawn of this sheriff’s station, my friend Greg, who had the one-hitter, the pot-smoking paraphernalia, we said, ‘It’s a bummer you had to throw that in the creek when they were chasing us.’
“He reached into his crotch and pulled it out and was like, ‘You think I’m gonna throw this thing away?’ So we smoked marijuana first thing in the morning in Urbana [Illinois] in front of the sheriff’s station, and now here I am.”
You can check out the full clip above. He starts detailing the story around the 6:30 mark.
Offerman’s most recent project was Alex Garland’s A24 dystopian thriller, Civil War, which is out now. He plays the fictional president alongside Kirsten Dunst, who stars as a journalist who must make her way to Washington D.C. before a group of rebels reach the White House.
