Zoë Kravitz survived a potentially career-ending mushroom trip on the first season of The Studio, but she almost didn’t make it out of a stay at Taylor Swift‘s house without destroying the joint in a mad panic. The actress/director stopped by Late Night With Seth Meyers on Tuesday night (Aug. 12) to share a hilariously harrowing story about the time her mom Lisa Bonet’s adorable pet snake almost caused an A-list incident.
Kravitz said Swift had generously invited the mother-daughter duo to stay in her home during the evacuations caused by the L.A. wildfires in January. “My mom lives in Topanga Canyon, so I said, ‘No, that’s a dangerous place to be. Come [here].’ And my mom has a pet snake, and so she has her evacuation stuff; she came over with the snake,” Kravitz said. “We ended up having to stay there for maybe about two weeks, and Taylor has this very beautiful house. I think it’s from the ’30s, like it’s a beautiful house, something you want to preserve and take care of.”
One way to take cover of such a jem is to not lose your reptile in it. But, as the pair were getting ready to leave on their last day and the Blink Twice director was packing up her things, Kravitz told her mom that she really wanted to “be a good house guest. I like to leave places better than I found them. I don’t want her [Swift] to even know we were here.’ So I was kind of going around and cleaning up, and I’m downstairs and she’s upstairs and my phone rings and it’s my mom.”
Uh oh.
It was Bonet and her voice was “super high,” which made Kravitz think something was amiss. “And she’s like, ‘I’m in a little bit of a pickle. Can you come upstairs?’” Kravitz said. That’s when she learned that Bonet’s pet snake, Orpheus, had found “this little hole in the corner” of the room to hide in.
Turns out the snake crawled into a hole next to a banquette built into the wall and while Bonet was able to get a hold of the snake’s tail, “they’re all muscle, they’re very, very strong, so she’s holding the snake’s tail. We don’t know what to do.” Kravitz said she started to panic as the snake crawled further and further into the hole.
“It’s like that scene in Jurassic Park when they’re in the car and the branches breaking every time they move,” Kravitz said. “I was panicking so much that my mom likes to say, ‘If I had both hands, I would have slapped you.’” They were saved by the house manager, who showed up with a crowbar to tear apart the banquette so they could reach the snake, adding that they were “ripping up the tile, we’re scratching the walls.”
In the end, she said, “we completely destroyed Taylor’s bathroom, and there was just this moment where I was like, ‘either we destroy her bathroom or I have to tell her that there’s a snake somewhere in her house,’” explained Kravitz, with Meyers saying they were “both bad options.” They did end up destroying the bathroom, with Meyers holding up a pic of the aftermath, with cabinets torn apart and Bonet and Kravitz laying on the floor, head-to-head, holding on to the snake with all their might.
Kravitz said she assured the house manager that she would pay for the damages, asking him to not say anything until was all fixed. “And I remember calling her [Swift] and saying, ‘Hey — also very high voice — I wanted to talk to you about something,’ and she was like, ‘Is it the fact that you almost lost a stake in our house and destroyed my bathroom?,’” Kravitz said.
The story — which came on the same day that Swift announced her upcoming 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl — prompted Meyers to joke that Orpheus is definitely “gonna get like three songs on the next album.”
Watch Kravitz tell her snake tale below.
