Caught Stealing comes out in two weeks, the Darren Aronofsky movie that stars Zoe Kravitz and Austin Butler, who each happened to leave their respective partners while filming but are totally not dating each other, just spending a lot of time together. I still feel like Aronofsky owes me $14-and-change for the two hours of my life I’ll never get back when I paid to see Mother!, but I admit that the full cast for Caught Stealing is stacked so I may have to relent. With the release approaching, the stars have hit the promo trail, which included Zoe Kravitz appearing on Late Night with Seth Meyers on Tuesday. While there, Zoe shared a lovely story about her friend Taylor Swift inviting Zoe and her mother, Lisa Bonet, to stay at Taylor’s abode during the LA wildfires earlier this year. And then the story took a decidedly bonkers turn when Lisa, who’d brought along her pet snake Orpheus, learned the hard way that you don’t let a snake stretch its (non-existent) legs when you’re a guest in someone’s home.

“My mom has a pet snake and so she came over with the snake,” she said, adding of having to evacuate their homes, “We ended up having to stay there for maybe about two weeks.”

“Taylor has a very beautiful house from the ‘30s, it’s just something you want to preserve and take care of,” Kravitz continued. “…It was the last day, I was gonna leave [for work], my mom was actually going to stay longer … and I was saying to my mom, ‘I really want to be a good house guest … I don’t want her to even know we were here.’”

The Blink Twice star said that as she was packing up her things, her mom called with a problem.

“She goes … ‘I’m in a little bit of a pickle, can you come upstairs’ … and she’s [in] the bathroom and she’s like crouched in the corner in this weird way,” recalled Kravitz. “She’s like, ‘so I was washing my face and I had Orpheus (the snake’s name) and I just put her down for a second, closed the door and she found this little hole in the corner.’”

Kravitz said the snake had slithered into “a little hole” in the corner of Swift’s bathroom, before Bonet, 57, quickly grabbed its tail.

“The hole is next to a banquette that is built into the wall that has two drawers at the bottom,” she described. “…So I get down the ground, I take the drawers out [and] as this is happening, the snake is getting further and further [away] … I was panicking so much.”

Kravitz said she ended up calling the house manager, who brought a crowbar to “tear apart” the banquette in an attempt to catch the snake.

“We’re ripping up the tile, we’re scratching the walls … [We] completely destroyed Taylor’s bathroom,” the actress admitted. Kravitz said she offered to pay to fix the bathroom and to not let Swift, 35, know “until it’s fixed.”

“I remember calling her and saying, ‘Hey … I wanted to talk to you about something,’” recalled Kravitz. “And she was like, ‘Is it the fact that you almost lost a snake in the house and destroyed my bathroom?’”

[From People]

Am I crazy (don’t answer that), or is the scariest part of this story the fact that Taylor knew right away about everything that went down? Forget the snake, there’s a mole and/or a rat in that house! That really is a crazy, sitcom-worthy misadventure, and I highly recommend watching the clip, because Zoe tells it well and there are a lot of extra flourishes left out of People Mag’s excerpts. Like Zoe describing her mother’s voice as alarmingly high-pitched when she first calls her daughter to inform her of the “pickle.” Or the well-timed quip from Seth Meyers that Zoe ought to expect at least three snake songs on Taylor’s next album. Wait, do you think Taylor told Zoe to sit on this story for talk show banter until it could be aligned with the announcement for The Life of a Showgirl? Also, given that this happened in the home of Taylor, Queen of the Snake Army, the fact that it was a snake loose had to be at least somewhat pleasing to Tay, right? Like the universe KNOWS that is her symbolism! LOL.

PS — For those keeping tabs at home, yes, this is the second snake loose in a bathroom story we’ve had in under a month.

Zoe Kravitz and Taylor Swift are shown out to dinner in November, 2024. They’re also shown out with Selena Gomez in LA in October, 2023. Credit: JosiahW/Backgrid, The Daily Stardust/ShotbyNYP/Backgrid, Media Punch/INSTARimages.com