Nick Offerman recalls spending ‘whole night in jail’ after he was mistaken for a robber

Parks and Recreation star Nick Offerman has admitted that he “experimented with misdemeanours” as a teen, recalling the time he spent a whole night in jail.

Appearing on Wednesday (17 April) night’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Offerman joked that he was “the douchebag” of his family of “exemplary citizens”.

“I experimented with misdemeanours when I was young,” he shared, before going on to retell the time he was once jailed after he and a group of friends were mistaken for robbers.

“Some friends and I, we can say this now, in California, we were smoking marijuana out behind a community theatre late one night. And some flashlights came along the creek where we were hanging out, and we realised it was police, and so we began to tiptoe away, and they gave chase, and we wisely ran,” Offerman, now 53, explained.

“And they tackled us and an incredibly tough, diminutive woman who I think may have been Holly Hunter,” he jested, referring to his Paradise co-star, “had her boot on my head and she had her gun on me”.

He continued: “It turned out that a restaurant had been robbed of a bunch of cash up the creek. 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 theatre kids, and we were saying, ‘No, we were just out there smoking and talking, officer.’

“Thankfully, we put up enough of a collective front that they decided we weren’t the thieves. They let us go in the morning, so they kept us all night.

“As the sun was coming up, we walked out, and on the front lawn of this sheriff’s station, my friend Greg, who had the one-hitter, the pot-smoking paraphernalia, we said, ‘It’s a bummer you had to throw that in the creek when they were chasing us,’” Offerman recounted.

“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 [Illinois] in front of the sheriff’s station, and now here I am.”

Offerman currently stars in A24’s new dystopian thriller, Civil War. The film, which has divided viewers, stars Kirsten Dunst as a military-embedded journalist who must make her way to Washington DC before a group of rebels descend on the White House.

“Dunst is brilliant, but Alex Garland’s provocative action film falls short of greatness,” Clarisse Loughrey wrote in her two-star review for The Independent.

“British writer-director Garland, with his valuable outsider perspective, shoots exactly as if he were making a modern war movie about a conflict elsewhere,” Loughrey added. “And yet it falls frustratingly short, having collapsed into the same thematic issues as Garland’s previous work, 2022’s Men.”

Civil War is out in cinemas now.