Nick Offerman Once Spent The Night High In Jail After Being Mistaken For A Robber

Nick Offerman is out there promoting Civil War, and appeared on Tuesday night’s ep of Jimmy Kimmel Live! In the interview, 53-year-old Nick told a story about getting arrested in his youth. He prefaced it with, “My mom and dad don’t know about this.” Well, buckle up Cathy and Ric Offerman (yes, I Wiki-ed their names), you’re in for a doozy.

Nick says that one night, he and a few of his college friends were smoking weed (“we can say this now, in California”) behind a community theater. Before they knew it, their chill smoke sesh turned into a terrifying police chase, via Entertainment Weekly:

“Some flashlights came along the creek where we were hanging out, and we realized it was police, and so we began to tiptoe away, and they gave chase, and we wisely ran. And they tackled us and an incredibly tough, diminutive woman who I think may have been Holly Hunter… had her boot on my head and she had her gun on me.”

Apparently, the cops had mistaken Nick and his friends for robbers:

“It turned out that a restaurant had been robbed of a bunch of cash up the creek,” he explained. “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 theater kids, and we were saying, ‘No, we were just out there smoking and talking, officer.’”

Nick says, eventually, he and his friends “put up enough of a collective front” that the cops decided they weren’t the thieves. They finally let the kids go in the morning. Nick recalls standing on the front lawn of the sheriff’s station as the sun came up, and everyone agreeing that it was a shame their friend Greg had to ditch his one-hitter (“the pot-smoking paraphernalia”) the night before:

“We said, ‘It’s a bummer you had to throw that in the creek when they were chasing us,’” Offerman recalled. “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 in front of the sheriff’s station, and now here I am.”

That wasn’t the only time Megan Mullally’s husband got arrested in college. He went to jail after getting caught stuffing eight Ronnie Millsap cassettes down his pants: “the perfect crime.”

“I went to jail and I was terrified,” he said. “And I was like, ‘C’mon you guys, clearly this is a bit.’ But they wanted to teach me a lesson, and they did. It was the opening night of the first time I got cast in a play at the University of Illinois, and I was in this production of Picnic, and so if I hadn’t made it to the play, I probably would have been kicked out of school.”

Luckily, a friend bailed Nick out in the nick (heh, I didn’t even mean to do that) of time. He arrived at the theater 12 minutes before curtain, “put on my stuff and went out and gave the most tearful performance.” And now he’s playing the President in the #1 movie in America.

Here’s Nick’s interview with Jimmy Kimmel: