Keri Russell’s six-season run on The Americans will rightfully be canonized among the greatest dramatic performances in TV history. But the actress has only appeared in two projects since the series wrapped in 2018, one of which, December 2019’s Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker, was filmed while The Americans was still airing. By the time the Star Wars press tour had wrapped, famously, a pandemic happened.
Three years later, Russell is now starring in a new project, which is certainly exciting. That it’s a movie titled Cocaine Bear—literally about a bear who is on cocaine—begs several questions, such as: What? Why? And, to drive home the point: What the hell?
“Well, obviously, I'm always gunning for Oscar nominations, which is why I chose an award-worthy project like Cocaine Bear,” Russell tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, erupting into a laughing fit on the phone before deadpanning: “I just feel like that award show needs a little spice in its repertoire.”
How does one describe Cocaine Bear, when one does not have 37 hours of your rapt attention to do it? (Though if any description deserves that much of your time, it is Cocaine Bear.)
The film, written by Jimmy Warden and directed by Elizabeth Banks, is based on a true story. Well… sort of. It’s the kind of wild tale that people say things like “you can’t make this shit up” about—except for the parts that are made up.
More accurately, Cocaine Bear springboards off of something that really happened.
On Sept. 11, 1985, Andrew Thornton III, an Army paratrooper-turned-racehorse trainer-turned-narcotics cop-turned-DEA agent-turned-lawyer-turned-cocaine smuggler nicknamed “Cocaine Cowboy,” was flying 880 pounds of Colombian powder into the country, likely while high off the supply.
Allegedly convinced the Feds were tailing him, he decided to ditch three duffle bags of coke while over the Chattahoochee National Forest of Georgia. He then put the plane on autopilot and jumped with a parachute. Something went wrong on the way down, and he didn’t make it. Those duffle bags, however, did.
Four months later, the corpse of a 175-pound black bear was found in the Chattahoochee wilderness, dead from a combination of cerebral hemorrhaging, hyperthermia, respiratory failure, renal failure, and heart failure. The bear had, evidently, discovered one of Thornton’s duffles and consumed its entire contents—roughly 35 pounds of cocaine.
That’s all real. What Cocaine Bear imagines, with great creative license, is what happened in that brief, potentially chaotic window, when a massive mammal was absolutely blitzed on an ungodly amount of blow. The possibilities that Warren dreams up and Banks puts on screen is a frenzied, relentless murderous rampage, a horror-comedy-slasher-thriller unlike anything Russell had ever signed on for.
“When I read it, I couldn’t believe a studio was going to make this movie,” Russell says. “I still can’t. I feel like they might still pull it.”
Keri Russell and Cocaine Bear: A Love Story
When something like Cocaine Bear comes into a person’s life, they remember the exact circumstances.
Russell had been talking with Banks about working together on a completely different project, which, needless to say, carried a distinctively different tone. But the next day, Banks called her back to pitch her this movie about a drug-addled bear on a killing spree. “I thought it was so insane,” Russell says. “[Banks] goes, ‘No, it’s even more insane than you think.’”
This all was happening during 2021, when the world was coming out of hibernation (heh) and industry productions were starting up on a regular basis again. But COVID cases were still high, and things remained uneasy. For a certain kind of a person, those are the perfect conditions in which to say, “You know what? Screw it.”
“I just thought it was such a crazy, let-loose departure from everything we were experiencing at that moment,” Russell says. “And I was like, why the fuck shouldn’t we do Cocaine Bear right now?”
In fact, that sentiment evolved into somewhat of a life philosophy for Russell and her family. (Cocaine Bear: as effective as therapy.)
“Since COVID, I haven’t really signed on to anything that intense or serious or sentimental, because I’ve been much more drawn to the light and the fun,” she says, reflecting on the mindset that led her to Cocaine Bear. “Life is hard enough right now.”
Even the upcoming Apple TV+ limited drama series that she’s a part of, Extrapolations—alongside a star-studded cast that includes Meryl Streep, Kit Harrington, and Tobey Maguire—has a premise that belies its tone, Russell says. For a show about the effect that climate change has on the lives of a group of interconnected people, she claims it’s brighter and funnier than one might expect.
“My partner Matthew (Rhys, her former The Americans co-star), I can’t get him to even sit down and watch something with me if it’s at all somber or sad. He says, ‘No, no. No way. I can’t.’” she says. “I think my appetite for sad things and serious things is sort of full in regular life.”
But it’s one thing to talk about the catharsis of working on a film like Cocaine Bear in theory, especially in hindsight after the film’s been completed. It’s another to get the script and actually sign on.
During COVID, there were a few families that she and Rhys “entrenched with,” Russell says. Their kids call her and the other women in the group the “Moms Gone Wild.” When she told those moms about the project, they said to her, “If you don’t do this movie, we’re breaking up with you.” For his part, Rhys didn’t threaten the dissolution of their relationship; he asked for a job. “Matthew read it and was like, ‘Who’s playing that guy?!’” Russell says of the character Rhys ends up playing as a cameo in the film. “He was like, ‘Text Banks and tell her I want to do that part.’”
But if there’s one thing that really convinced Russell to do it, it was learning that her Emmy-winning The Americans co-star, Margo Martindale, was signing on to the movie, too: “We were texting, and she was like, ‘Are you doing this movie?’ I was like, ‘Are you doing this movie?!’”
Russell’s tickled at the idea that, because she and Martindale had last worked together in something as gripping as The Americans, people might show up to Cocaine Bear assuming it is a similarly dramatic and ultra-serious project. Instead, they would quickly discover a tweaking bear, gratuitous gore, and a conveyor belt of jumpscares and laughs.
There’s something beautiful, then, about the Americans trio—Russell, Rhys, and Martindale—turning Cocaine Bear into a family reunion, of sorts. “It's what we really want to represent us,” Russell laughs.
A Film Shoot Like No Other
The thing about a movie like Cocaine Bear is that you actually have to create a bear that is on cocaine.
To up the stakes, the film recasts the real-life black bear with a 500-pound female sun bear, whose omnivorous palate and impressive climbing skills lent themselves to a more cinematic approach.
The all-important nugget that has become the selling point of the film—bear does cocaine; bear kills people while high—requires a tangle of human storylines in order to make all the attacking and the eating of the people really land. Cue some hiking tourists, criminals on the lam, and park rangers, one of whom is played by Martindale, all dealing with their own interpersonal drama—and all unknowingly being pursued by a ravenous bear fiending for its next victim, hit of coke, or both.
Russell plays Sari, a divorced single mom whose 12-year-old daughter, Dee Dee (Brooklyn Prince), plays hooky one afternoon with her best friend, Henry (Christian Convery). They stumble on some cocaine in the woods and, in the aftermath, a bit of bedlam—especially once they meet the fateful bear. After the kids become separated, Sari and Henry set out to track down Dee Dee, a task that requires trying desperately not to be gobbled up by a bear that has ingested enough cocaine to power an entire weekend of parties in West Hollywood.
Weta, the New Zealand-based company behind many of Andy Serkis’ memorable motion capture performances, was brought in to create the bear, who would lovingly become known as “Cokey.” Motion capture artist and stunt performer Allan Henry was on set to play Cokey, so that the actors could react to a character who was both high-as-hell on cocaine and also bear-like.
“These guys are amazing,” Russell remembers about filming. “But also, it is a grown man in a unitard acting like a bear in front of you.”
Even more ridiculous were the takes in which she and the other actors would have to film their close-ups, an acting challenge that became more surreal as the scenes became more outrageous. For those takes, the camera trained in on their faces, while Banks screamed into a microphone from Video Village, bellowing prompts about what the bear is doing for the actors to react to.
“‘OK, and now he’s climbing up the hill! And now the bear is ripping his face off and there’s blood everywhere! Now his leg is falling from the tree!’” Russell says, reenacting Banks’ directives. “It was her just yelling out the blow-by-blow, and then us laughing at each other, going, ‘Oh my God, look what they’re doing…’”
Amazingly, that wasn’t the most bizarre acting challenge Russell faced. The film shot in Ireland, and part of the way through, Convery, the young actor who played Henry, tested positive for COVID and couldn’t shoot for 10 days. To keep the production on schedule, a local Irish boy was brought in as a stand-in. For 10 days, all of Russell’s scenes were her and this boy walking around the woods in labored configurations, so that the camera couldn’t see his face. Russell was delivering the outlandish lines to him while he just smiled back at her silently, because he didn’t know the lines.
So that Russell actually had dialogue to react to, Banks once again took up the microphone from Video Village. “So it’s fucking Banks in the background screaming this little kid’s lines in the background in this Southern accent: ‘Ms. McKinley, have you ever done cocaine?’ And me looking at this little blank-faced kid.”
Suffice it to say, it was a film shoot unlike any other Russell had been a part of—and this is an actress who has worked on a motion-capture film before, with Rise of Skywalker and 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. (Much less cocaine in those ones.) To presume that it was worth it is an understatement.
Russell, Rhys, Martindale, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who also stars, recently screened the film together in New York. “We were screaming, slapping each other, and laughing our faces off.” She and the Moms Gone Wild crew are bringing their teenagers to a showing on opening night Friday, so they can experience the film in person.
“This is not one to watch on your couch alone,” she says. “This is definitely crowd-pleaser craziness.Y ou should do what you’ve got to do: Drink your beers or do whatever it is that you’d like, and then go see it. This is that movie.”
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