Zoë Kravitz and her mom, actor Lisa Bonet, had a wild adventure at the home of her good friend Taylor Swift when they sought shelter there during January’s Los Angeles fires.
The two women, along with Bonet’s pet snake, stayed in Swift’s house for about two weeks while the owner was away, Kravitz recalled on Tuesday’s episode of Late Night With Seth Meyers.
Everything went okay until the last day for Kravitz, who had to leave for work, while Bonet stayed behind.
“I was packing up my things, and I was saying to my mom, ‘I want to be a good houseguest. I like to leave places better than I found them. I don’t want her to even know we were here,'” Kravitz said. “So I was kind of going around and cleaning up.”
That’s when her mom called her on the phone from another part of the house, which she thought was odd. Bonet’s voice was “super high” as she summoned her daughter.
It turned out that Bonet normally holds the snake, named Orpheus, but had put her down for a moment with the door closed to wash her face. Orpheus had “found this little hole in the corner” that wasn’t visible, and Bonet was left holding only part of the tail.
At that point, Meyers joked that the hole was a design flaw: “That’s on Taylor. You can’t have a snake hole in your house.”
The women didn’t know what to do.
“I was panicking so much,” Kravitz said, “that my mom likes to say, ‘If I’d had both hands, I would have slapped you.’ Just like, ‘Get it together!'”
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They called in help via Kravitz’s assistant, who also didn’t know what to do, and the manager of the house, who was not too happy to hear about the snake.
“He gets a crowbar and starts having to tear apart this banquette. We’re ripping up the tile. We’re scratching the walls,” Kravitz said. “And there was just this moment where I was like, ‘Either we destroy her bathroom, or I have to tell her that there’s a snake somewhere in her house.'”
It’s probably worse for the snake to be missing, because “your house is ruined forever,” said the star of Darren Aronofsky’s new movie Caught Stealing, which arrives in theaters Aug. 29.
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So they “destroyed the bathroom,” with Kravitz telling the house manager that she would pay for everything and asking if he would please not tell Swift until it was fixed.
“And I remember calling her and saying, ‘Hey!’ — also [in a] very high voice — I wanted to talk to you about something,” Kravitz recounted. “And she was like, ‘Is it the fact that you almost lost a snake in my house and destroyed my bathroom?'”
Meyers joked that the snake would get three songs on Swift’s next album, The Life of a Showgirl, which she announced Tuesday.
