At least the cast of the Super Mario Bros. movie was high most of the time

There’s been no shortage of digital ink spilled—from this site, especially— on the shitshow that was the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, which, for most 30-somethings, holds the unique distinction of having taught their entire generation that movies could be bad. This new deep dive into the film’s troubled production from The Guardian, however, emerges as the most thorough document of its failure, and one of its biggest revelations is in just how much everyone behind it tried to make it not awful. In the article’s most hilarious revelation, actress Samantha Mathis recalls the crew’s press junket in Japan and the kind of goodwill that even she knew the film didn’t deserve.

“We were there for over two weeks,” she says. “I remember being in an old temple in Tokyo with Bob and John, and there were Buddhist monks praying for the success of the film. We all looked at each other when we realised what was going on; we thought: ‘This is sacrilegious – these priests should not be praying for our crazy movie!’”

But the monks weren’t the only optimistic ones. Sure, lore tend to center around cast members Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper’s extreme embarrassment at its very mention, as well as reports that the actors themselves were prone to slugging shots of whiskey in between takes. And it’s all true: Cast member (and character actor royalty) Richard Edson notes that weed was also fairly ubiquitous behind the scenes. “We would hang out a lot and get stoned,” he says. “Bob [Hoskins] would never hang out – he had a mansion somewhere down the beach. But then one night, we were talking about getting high and Bob was like, ‘You guys have pot? You’ve been smoking reefer?’ And we were like, ‘Yeah’, and he yelled, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?! I’ve been sitting alone in my mansion!’ We really looked up to him.”