I don’t know if it’s a product of my getting older, or if it’s the Age of Incompetence we find ourselves in, but air travel feels more precarious than it used to. The man in charge of (dismantling) our government is getting rid of qualified air traffic controllers and then blaming accidents on DEI, while TSA agents take their job to the extreme by confiscating snacks and zeroing in on sweaty travelers. But hey, at least we get to keep our shoes on now during the security check line. Aside from all those hurdles to navigate, Rachel Brosnahan brings another problem to the seat-back tray table. You see, Rachel has been hexed with a traveling curse. She always makes it to her destinations, but anything and everything that could go wrong in the process, does. So Rachel knew she finally had to do something to kick the curse ahead of the worldwide promotional blitz for Superman. Which is why she did the sensible thing and called in a witch, as she just described to Jimmy Fallon:

During a Wednesday, July 16, appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Brosnahan revealed that she hired a witch to ensure that her travel experience would go smoothly. The decision came after she stated that DC Studios co-head Peter Safran refused to travel with her due to the severity of the curse.

“I was really worried, obviously, about this upcoming tour, and I got really desperate and I started asking people if anyone knew, like an energy healer or a past-life reader,” she said.

Brosnahan continued, recalling, “I called a witch and brought her to my house.”

“She brought a wishing well and a wand, and she signed an NDA,” the actress said, adding that they spoke about her travel trauma before they “tackled the curse together.”

Happily, the witchcraft helped. “I made it around the world, and I’m here, and I believe in witches and curses now,” Brosnahan admitted. The star gushed about the experience of traveling and interacting with “amazing” and “really enthusiastic” fans on the tour.

Speaking about the curse, she hypothesized that the spell was cast by a “petty” witch because, “I always make it where I’m trying to go, but it’s never not as stressful as humanly possible to get there. It’s the absolute worst.”

“Nobody believes the curse, I should say, until they travel with me. And the number of times that somebody’s looked at me and been like, ‘Ma’am, I’m so sorry. I’ve just never seen this before’ is too many times,” she explained.

According to Brosnahan, the first time that she experienced it was when she was flying to Cannes from a set in New Mexico with a 36-hour window to promote a movie at the film festival.

When she embarked on the drive to the highway, it was a sunny day. However, they wound up caught in an “apocalyptic storm.”

[From People]

I’m not gonna poke fun at Rachel for calling in a witch to break a curse, because some people really do have the worst travel luck (more on that in a bit). I am going to poke fun at Rachel for calling in a witch… and having her sign an NDA but then spilling the whole story on national TV. That, to me, is a hoot. Also, she was engaging the services of a witch — does an NDA really have any chance of standing up to those powers? I think not!

Ultimately, though, I have to thank Rachel for sharing her (former) travel woes, because now I have a concrete solution to present to a friend of mine who is similarly cursed (and yes, it’s the same guy who got in trouble for accidentally sneezing on a Monet). Like Rachel, my friend once found himself in the American Southwest and managed to conjure an “apocalyptic storm.” It was a hail storm, in fact, in Sedona, Arizona. He’s also been on a plane where the wheels bounced off the ground a few times before sticking the landing, and another time he quickly rebooked himself on a new flight leaving promptly after his original flight was delayed… only to remember once midair that his checked bag was still arriving at the destination via the delayed flight. But my all time favorite calamity of his was when he tried to get into the Global Entry program. He marched himself over for an interview in his finest duds, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection was READY for him. They pulled out a record and said, “We see in your file, sir, that in 2009 we had to detain you for refusing to surrender a salami upon reentry from Italy. What do you have to say for yourself?” At which point my friend launched into a monologue about just how good Genoa salami is. To this day, he is not in the Global Entry program. But now I know to book him a witch for his birthday!!

Photos credit: Jeff Rivera/TheNews2/Cover Images, Backgrid