About halfway through Cocaine Bear, a giant, co*ked-out female black bear wanders through the forest and plops its 500-pound body on top of a terrified drug runner. At this point, the furry beast has consumed at least a couple of bricks from some scattered, ill-placed duffel bags and torn through several humans. A mix of crimson and white has stained its snout and paws. But with every high comes a low, and eventually this furry beast buckles and drops into a blow-fueled coma, effectively trapping one of the men indirectly responsible for its brain-altering rampage.
On the movie’s actual film set, this inopportune resting spot looked a little different. Because director Elizabeth Banks’s drooling and deranged protagonist is an entirely CGI creation—they weren’t going to tame a real black bear. Instead, stunt actor, movement expert, and performance capture artist Allan Henry was enlisted to replicate the bear’s quadrupedal existence and terrifying violence; his movements would later be substituted by detailed animation by a Weta FX digital effects team. “It’s similar to some of the work I’ve done before, but this was one of the most ridiculous offers,” Henry says, “which I think made it so interesting and so much fun.”
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To capture the apex predator’s size and stature, Henry filled his black spandex suit with foam and carried a lifelike silicone bear head—attached to a rotatable pole—two feet above his shoulders. Soon, he was spreading out his limbs and lying flat over actor Alden Ehrenreich, whose limited lung capacity muffled his character’s shouts for help. It looked ridiculous. “We got really close and intimate for a while, and it was hard for either of us not to laugh,” Henry says. “The rest of the crew is being very professional, and you’ve just got this group of weirdos lying on the ground giggling to each other.”
Standing next to them as Ehrenreich’s partner, O’Shea Jackson Jr. couldn’t keep it together. “There’s no way around it—it’s ridiculous,” he says. “It’s one of those moments where you’re like, This is my job. This is what I do to feed myself!”
“I said that almost every day,” Henry laughs.
To match the utter absurdity of its high-concept premise, turning Cocaine Bear into a fleshed-out, feature-length movie required attention to authenticity, a heavy bump of imagination, and a hearty sense of “WTF.” The story is loosely based on the true events of a failed 1980s drug drop when investigators found a black bear’s dead carcass in the Georgia wilderness with traces of cocaine in its bloodstream. Saddened by the animal’s fate, writer Jimmy Warden considered what might have happened if that bear had stayed alive and if it had kept inhaling pounds and pounds of the white powder. “The bear dying immediately bummed me out,” he says, though it quickly inspired a bold idea: “We’ve got to make this the revenge story of the bear.”
When Banks first read the script, she knew she could ground the plot’s absurdity in the emotional arcs of its characters. But she also couldn’t wait to conceive and orchestrate its blood-soaked thrill-ride set pieces—big swings that meant trusting her own instincts and a team of bear experts, stunt performers, and VFX artists to pull it off. Indeed, if Cocaine Bear lives up to its B-movie name, it’s only because Banks was determined to embrace—and ingest—all of its ludicrous material. “Making the movie was almost like taming the chaos that was all around me,” she says. “It became my opportunity to redeem that bear.”
The idea for Cocaine Bear came to Warden while he was scrolling through Twitter in 2019. After seeing a photo of a stuffed bear at the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall with the caption “Pablo Escobear,” the writer began looking for its origin story and quickly sent an article to his friend and producer Brian Duffield. Looking for some inspiration to begin a screenplay on spec, Warden jokingly asked whether he should consider this ill-fated black bear as his subject matter. “He was like, ‘Yeah, do it,’” Warden says.
As he researched and burrowed into internet rabbit holes, he discovered that the bear’s death was just a small strand in a nefarious web. In the early hours of September 11, 1985, Fred Myers, a Knoxville, Tennessee, retiree, looked through his window and saw a dead man in his driveway. When the police showed up, they identified the body as Andrew Carter Thornton II, a former narcotics agent turned drug smuggler, who had wrapped a duffel bag filled with 34 football-sized bundles of cocaine around his waist. Later that morning, as detailed in Sally Denton’s book The Bluegrass Conspiracy, authorities discovered a crashed plane in Macon County, North Carolina, that they matched to a key in Thornton’s pocket.
The FAA determined that Thornton, in an effort to avoid detection, took off from Colombia, put the plane on autopilot, and jumped from an altitude of 7,000 feet, but his parachute cords tangled with his dope-filled duffel. Later that month, park rangers found three bags filled with 210 pounds of cocaine hanging from an open parachute in a tree in the Chattahoochee National Forest. It wasn’t until December that members of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found the decomposing remains of a black bear in the same woods, sprawled next to an empty bag they believed once contained 75 pounds of cocaine. A later autopsy confirmed that the bear had absorbed “three or four grams of cocaine into its blood stream,” which was enough to kill it within about 20 minutes. “Its stomach was literally packed to the brim with cocaine,” the medical examiner told Kentucky for Kentucky. “There isn’t a mammal on the planet that could survive that.”
The 175-pound bear was eventually taxidermied, and over the next two decades, it went on a wild journey—from temporary storage units to pawnshops to Waylon Jennings’s friend’s mansion to the famous Lexington mall where it stands today. The whole story staggered Warden, but he felt like the crime saga was meant for “everybody who was doing true crime podcasts and TV shows,” he says. Instead, Warden kept going back to the bear’s undocumented experience tearing through a duffel bag and ingesting a foreign substance. “What was most interesting was that the bear did cocaine,” he says, a sentence that’s as ridiculous as it is convincing.
Warden started writing “Escobear” fan fiction, building a script he never assumed would get made. “It was something that would maybe make a splash on some assistants’ desks,” he says. “If that was the initial objective, I couldn’t lose, because I would continue to try to cross the line and entertain myself.” He started envisioning a story within the mold of 1963’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, in which a bunch of strangers all embark on a treasure hunt at the same time. Applying the same conceit, he asked himself, “If cocaine dropped in the middle of the woods, who would go after it?” Soon, he started sketching out drug dealers, detectives, park rangers, wildlife inspection agents, oblivious hikers, and two lost kids with a mother searching for them. “When you throw in the cocaine bear hungry for only blood,” he says, “that’s when the comedy comes out.”
Though Warden admits his first draft had spelling errors and character inconsistencies, Duffield had already sent it to producers Christopher Miller and Phil Lord without his permission. The duo had known Warden from his days as a production assistant on 21 Jump Street and were immediately intrigued. “It was one of those things where you hear the concept and you’re like, ‘That’s interesting, but is there a real movie in it?’” Miller told Variety. “But Jimmy did a great job making it into something that would be fun—better than you’d imagine for something called Cocaine Bear.” Lord and Miller promptly took it to Universal, with whom they had a first-look deal, and, despite the typically bleak theatrical landscape for comedies, the studio wanted something bold to “cut through the clutter.”
“Two weeks after finishing the script, it was sold and on a fast track,” Warden says.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Banks received the screenplay from her agent and instantly began thinking about Jurassic Park. The 1993 classic became her true north, she says, as she balanced the character arcs of a couple of innocent kids, the drug dealers responsible for corrupting nature, and the furry victim at its center. “We’re seeing something incredible, it’s inspiring awe inside of us, and then that awe turns to terror when we realize we’re not in control of that animal, that dinosaur, that bear—and we are now its prey,” she says. “I just knew that the juxtaposition of those two things is where the fun was.”
In her pitch deck to Lord and Miller, Banks leaned into her love for Evil Dead and Dawn of the Dead, highlighting slides of graphic and grotesque imagery based on animal attacks she found online. The photos reflected Warden’s own thinking, which equated to “Sam Raimi gore inside of a Spielberg movie, and then some Coen brother twists with Middle America characters.” But Banks wasn’t looking for pure gimmicks. She didn’t want a cartoonish-looking bear that’d blunt the pure terror of this nightmarish day-gone-wrong scenario. “We needed a sense of reality,” Banks says. “I wanted it to be a documentary of a bear.”
A month before shooting began, Banks interviewed Henry to discuss bringing the affectionately dubbed “co*key the bear” to life. Though she had already directed fight sequences for 2019’s Charlie’s Angels, Banks didn’t have much experience with mo-cap artists, let alone any extensive black bear knowledge. All she knew was that Universal had teamed with Weta FX, the visual effects company founded by Peter Jackson, to create the most photorealistic bear it could. “She was wonderfully honest,” Henry says. “She just said, ‘I have no idea how this works.’”
Based in New Zealand, Henry had worked with Weta on the digital effects team for more than a decade, providing performance capture and movement coaching for movies such as The Avengers and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. His background and ability to bridge the information gap soon became invaluable for Banks, and within a few days after he was hired, he started an intensive research process, diving into a self-imposed curriculum of documentaries, CCTV footage, and interviews with bear experts and animal psychologists. “From all that research, I try to figure out not only how I could physically be that kind of [bear] shape, but also how I could try to match the emotional state of a bear in a certain situation,” Henry says.
Over the next two weeks, Henry recorded himself on his iPhone—“Almost like setting up the bigfoot shot,” he jokes—to make sure his gait matched that of the black bears he was studying. He noticed the shift in a bear’s energy when it realizes it’s being watched by human beings and its innate ability to “explode into movement or speed or climbing or hitting someone.” With a basic foundation, Henry and Banks discussed how they would exaggerate co*key’s movements to emphasize its altered state. “We knew we could sprinkle a little sauce on there,” Banks says. “That sort of allowed us to think about the bear as supercharged.”
Like Henry, Weta animation supervisor Carmelo Leggiero became a bear expert, analyzing everything about the way they stand on their hind legs and how they sneeze, blink, and turn their heads. According to Banks, the studying extended to “every muscle twitch, every hair, every whisker, every pore on its nose,” and Henry was able to use some of the team’s pre-visualization work as another movement guide when he got to set. To disguise any marginal errors, Henry dressed in a black suit that complemented his helmeted soft-silicone bear head, which gave actors a better reference point. “So much of the way a bear manipulates the world around it is with its snout and nose and mouth,” Henry says. “They wanted that movement in relation to what my body was doing.”
When co*key attacks and maims a hiker’s girlfriend in the opening scene, she’s flung off the ground before her arm is bitten off and thrown back at her partner. This kind of aerial assault happens a few more times throughout the movie in increasingly preposterous ways—blood-splattering moments that stunt coordinator Melissa Stubbs mapped out with rigs for Henry and the actors well in advance. “I overwrote the gore, for sure,” Warden admits. “I just loved seeing how far you could take it. When we had partners at Universal that were clearly willing to make the movie, we weren’t not going to go for the throat.”
Because a bear’s neck muscles are much more powerful than a human’s, Henry “grabbed [the hiker] and held on to her, and we choreographed: ‘I throw you here, I pick you up, I slam you this way, you try to get away,’” he says. “Even though I was acting in a human way, it still fit within the shape of where the bear would be.” As an actor, O’Shea Jackson Jr. appreciated the attention to detail. He remembers the challenges of using his imagination during the shooting of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, when “Ghidorah’s heads were tennis balls and orange Hs,” while “Mothra was just a giant light in the sky.” In that kind of VFX-heavy movie, “you’re trying to get a cast of actors to focus on the same eyeline,” he says, but more practical references and movements allowed for a more immersive environment.
That immersion sometimes meant that Henry growled. “I would grunt and sniff and roar and scratch things and make all sorts of noises.” A man in all black with an aluminum pole on his back who was trying to approximate the sounds of a bear extremely high on cocaine was objectively hilarious—“If you don’t think that’s funny,” Jackson says, “I don’t know what to tell you”—but it all helped build a more legitimate acting environment and ease the transition from comedy to shock-horror.
In the middle of laying out characters and story beats, Warden began thinking about the movie’s major set piece. What kinds of attacks would he highlight? Which people would get sliced and diced by a black bear’s paw? How long would it last? These are crucial questions for any action movie, but especially for a B movie with a protagonist capable of so much carnage. Eventually, a plan formed around a visitor center and a car chase. “Get it outside of its natural habitat, watch it interact with the world and an automobile,” Warden thought. And then he went one step further: “What happens if it just doesn’t stop?”
The result is a lengthy and gruesome sequence that never lets off the gas—at least, until it crashes. It begins at the National Park Service station, where co*key quickly turns into Jason Voorhees, shattering windows, busting down doors, and ripping up some teenagers. The collateral damage includes an injured trigger-happy park ranger (Margo Martindale) who gets strapped onto a gurney by a recently called paramedic (Kahyun Kim) as co*key traps the park ranger’s partner (Scott Seiss) under a broken door. When he breaks free and eventually climbs into the already moving ambulance, a hot pursuit sees the blood-lusting bear storm down a one-lane highway. “The reference for the ambulance chase was Fast and the Furious,” Banks laughs, “but one of the cars was a bear.”
Shooting got off on the wrong foot—literally. After watching his stunt double sprint and then lunge his way inside the ambulance, Seiss, on a movie set for the first time, was tasked with running over some flat terrain. “The first take that we got of me, I literally took three steps, fell on my face, ate sh*t, and rolled six times towards the ambulance,” Seiss says. “They were trying to figure out how to put that in the movie, but I would have been dead even earlier.” In some ways, it helped Seiss sink into the surreal scenario. “My character’s a dumbass,” he says. “This is a guy who doesn’t take his job seriously, and then he’s thrown into the worst possible day on the job, showing up to a call and seeing a bear on cocaine.”
As the bear chases the paramedics down, Banks goes for the signature—and most telling—shot of the movie: a slow-motion, physics-defying leap in which co*key lands inside the back of the ambulance. It’s a move not even cocaine could fuel, but it solidifies the movie’s tone and momentary slips from reality. “We could get away with stretching the truth,” Banks says—to the point where, as Seiss describes it, “it looks like a Looney Tunes cartoon.”
Once inside the still-moving ambulance, the rampage begins again. As Kim’s driver tries to keep the vehicle on the road, Seiss’s character starts fending off the bear. co*key quickly tears off his hand, a practical trick that Seiss performed with a prosthetic arm while covering his real one in a green sleeve. But perhaps the most graphic scene comes when the bear kicks Martindale out of the back of the van, the gurney flips, and her face slams into the pavement. Warden still remembers the language he used to describe it: “The bed slides out, and crack, crunch, her face drags against the gravel,” he says. The description required the filmmakers to use what Seiss recalls as a “mechanism that looked like something out of medieval times.”
The whole sequence was shot numerous times over the course of a few weeks; stunt actors were subbed in so that they could get as many angles as possible. It made Seiss question just about everything. “I was in a daze the entire time we were shooting,” he says. “Like, how is this not a fever dream? How did I not do cocaine and this is what I’m imagining? What the f*ck is going on?”
On its surface, Cocaine Bear supplies everything you want out of its title: cocaine, bears, bozos, and blood. But slightly—slightly—deeper, Banks makes good on her promise to redeem Pablo Escobear’s untimely death, gently critiquing the 1980s war on drugs, humanity’s casual environmental carelessness, and the corrupted innocence of children caught in its wake. “The movie is pretty antidrug. This movie is not ‘Yay cocaine.’ It’s really like, ‘Stay away from cocaine,’” Banks says. “We wanted to make sure that we entertain people. But I also wanted to remind people that nature is going to win if we don’t get it together. We cannot compete.”
When Seiss first flipped through the script, he attempted to tap into that moral universe. “I thought, ‘Well, there’s gotta be a reason that my character is killed,” he says. “This guy has either tested nature or not been a very good paramedic.” That mindset was easier for Henry, who, after three months of pretending to be a ravenous black bear, gained even more respect for the creature he portrayed. “I grew up with this understanding that the natural world and the creatures of the natural world deserve a lot of respect,” he says. “Every time you look at this sort of stuff, you have no choice but to gain more respect for what these creatures are.”
To be clear, co*key isn’t Godzilla, balancing the world’s natural order. As Jackson will attest, a drugged-out black bear isn’t playing in the same metaphorical sandbox. “co*key is no hero. This is a new age horror film monster,” Jackson says. “Cujo, Jaws, they get a lot of praise, but we need co*key represented. Who wants to deal with a big-ass black bear on cocaine?”
“I just wouldn’t want to see this bear die,” Warden says. “That’s the one line that I wasn’t able to cross. You just want to watch this bear succeed because it wasn’t her fault.” Which is why, before the credits roll, a lucid, roaring, and victorious co*key gets a money shot atop a waterfall. “It’s like Simba at the end of [The] Lion King,” Warden says, laughing, before pausing for a beat. “That’s probably exactly what I wrote.”
