The ‘Brady Bunch’ Episode Barry Williams Filmed Stoned
We all know the anguish of getting called into work on your day off. Not only does it ruin your day, there’s a very good chance that unless you’re a brain surgeon on call, you’re tied up in a situation that isn’t easy to get out of and into professional mode. Sometimes, that’s literally true — submissives in the crowd, we agree that what you do on your own time is your own business — but even more often, people use their freedom from labor to have fun with chemicals that would make it difficult to perform their occupational duties. Sitcom stars are no exception.
Of course, some of them spend their lives getting good enough at both acting and drugs that neither interferes with the other, aka the Charlie Sheen Effect, but at 17 years old, Barry Williams didn’t have the benefit of experience when the day he smoked his first joint coincided with one of the only two times he was ever unexpectedly called in on the Brady Bunch set. “We had to change our shooting schedule,” they told him, according to Williams’ book, Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, “so we’ll need you to come in and shoot the driveway scene” of the Season Four episode “Law and Disorder.”
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At first, Williams was pretty hyped about the situation. “All the way there, I was feeling my creative juices going,” he later said. “I thought, ‘Great opportunity to recreate the Greg Brady character in its entirety,’” a thought only a stoned person could have.
Unfortunately, his ambitions were dashed when he got to the set and director Hal Cooper asked him to cool it with the improvisations. “Pretty unusual work there, Barry, but for this one scene, please do me a favor (and) hit your mark, stand there, don’t move, and deliver your lines as written, okay?” Williams recalled Cooper telling him.
At that point, “I got scared out of my bell bottoms,” Williams explained. “The reason you don’t see me move after I trip over the line leading to my tire was ‘cause I was frozen.”
He looks it, too — not even noticing Cindy coming into the scene, apparently forgetting how to speak, and uttering a particularly memorable delivery of the words “far out.”
“It was a terrifying experience, I really regretted it, and my creativity shrunk into the background,” Williams maintained, insisting that “I’m a much better actor when I’m completely sober than when I’m high, so I just stay sober” now.
That’s almost certainly appreciated by viewers of all those movies and TV shows he filmed post-Brady Bunch. You know the ones.
