It certainly wasn’t a laughing matter when Eric Andre and Lil Rel Howery had a knife pulled on them while filming their prank-based comedy “Bad Trip”.
In a new interview with the LA Times, the stars reveal an angry business owner confronted them with a knife during a prank that involved pretending their penises were stuck together in a Chinese finger trap.
“I literally left and said, ‘I’m done. I’m not doing this movie’,” Howery says of the Netflix comedy. “I walked straight to my hotel still in my character clothes — that’s how mad I was. It was my kids who convinced me to keep going. I told them what happened and they thought it was hilarious.”
Andre, who has been injured and arrested while filming pranks for “The Eric Andre Show”, says that the threat is very real when filming in real-world situations.
“There’s always, like, this primal fear,” he says. “You’re going into an unpredictable situation, dealing with completely unpredictable people, and the threat of violence is always there.”
The comedian explains that he wanted the pranks to come off as playful as opposed to skewering the prank’s targets the way Sacha Baron Cohen employs in the “Borat” movies. Andre even showed Cohen an early cut of “Bad Trip” to get his take on the pranking element.
“We showed Sacha an early cut of the movie,” Andre reveals. “He laughed and said, ‘You know, my movies are set up to expose sh**ty, rich, white oligarchs. And your movie shows the beauty and the humanity of working-class people and people of colour’.”
“Bad Trip” is currently streaming on Netflix.
