Director Elizabeth Banks Shares Details About ‘Cocaine Bear,’ Including About Ray Liotta’s Final Performance

Director Elizabeth Banks at an event for the movie Cocaine Bear in Los Angeles

via NBC Universal


The 1980s are often remembered as an era of materialism, greed, and excess. Specifically, excess in the form of cocaine, the vice du jour of the yuppie white-collar class that lined their pockets with financial windfalls born out of the Reaganomics of the decade.

America’s appetite for cocaine and other drugs created all kinds of collateral fallout: The Contra scandals, the beginning of the crack epidemic, Nancy Reagan’s War On Drugs, and the beginning of the D.A.R.E. program.

Some of the greatest cinema of the 1980s are celluloid of coke-fueled excesses and the criminal underbelly that lurked in the shadows of the time: Scarface, Fletch, Die Hard, Wall Street, Beverly Hills Cop.

This is the world of Cocaine Bear, Elizabeth Banks’ upcoming monster movie about, well, a bear on cocaine. The first trailer for the movie recently dropped, captivating the culture about the movie’s premise before its release in February 2023.

The real-life Cocaine Bear story that inspired the movie

Cocaine Bear is inspired by the real-life saga of a black bear that ate millions of dollars of cocaine after it fell out of a Pablo Escobar drug trafficking plane.

As the story goes: In December 1985, authorities started looking for cocaine dropped out of a plane over the Chattahoochee National Forest near Blue Ridge, Georgia. Eventually, authorities found a dead bear that succumbed to an overdose after eating a ginormous amount of cocaine.

The cocaine is believed to be dropped out of the plane by Andrew Thornton, a former Purple Heart recipient and the police officer turned narco smuggler. Thorton, a former paratrooper in the 101st Airborne, died in the drug run when he jumped from his Cessna 404. His parachute failed to deploy. He freefell to the ground and was found splatted on a residential driveway near Knoxville. The plane crashed 60 miles away, in North Carolina.

The carcass of the bear was eventually stuffed and it became a part of the folklore. It’s been memed and retold time and time again, including many times on this very site:

Cocaine Bear, the upcoming movie, however, is not a scripted retelling. It is a fictional creature movie a la Snakes On A Plane or Jaws. It’s “inspired by true events.”

It promises the vibe and gore of a John Carpenter horror movie, with a key bump of narco thriller and zany ’80s comedy.

“This takes place in 1985,” Banks recently told an audience at a screening of the movie’s trailer. “So this is a real opportunity to create an homage to some of those kinds of films, but also to do something really unique tonally because it is also a character piece.”

It’s going to be dumb movie fun in its purest form.

Why make a movie about Cocaine Bear?

“I remember when I read this story thinking, ‘I have a lot of empathy for the bear,'” Banks acknowledges. “I was like, ‘This is really upsetting.’ This bear is the collateral damage of our truly f*cked up war on drugs, and I feel like we should make a movie that is the bear’s revenge story. And that’s what this is.”

“All my films so far mostly are about underdogs,” Banks adds.

The bear itself – which the production nicknamed “Cokey” – is CGI. The bear was brought to life by the same VFX studio behind Planet Of The Apes.

“It was conceived by looking at tons of reference photos of black bears and figuring out the size and the shape and the markings and everything,” Banks explains. To capture the bear’s movements for the action sequences, the production had a stunt performer on set named Allen Henry who walked around “quadruped” like a bear, which required special prosthetics.

“He was wrestling with our actors… While you don’t see Alan in any frame of the movie, I feel his presence in every shot of the bear.”

Though the original Cocaine Bear was a black bear, to get the bear right, production did a deep dive into the mannerism and behavior of different bear species, including sun bears (“They have the most facial expressions”) and grizzlies.

“Bears walk on their hind legs,” Banks reminds. The goal was to keep all the behaviors of the coked-out bear realistic, in an attempt to suspend the audience’s disbelief. “They actually walk around on two feet a lot. They get up, they grab stuff, they walk around. We looked at a lot of bears doing fun, silly things and tried to figure out what we could have the bear do.”

Could Cocaine Bear also be social commentary?

Can a dumb fun action comedy have a little more thematic meat on the bone?

It sounds like it.

Despite Cocaine Bear’s pulpy premise, Banks suggests there will be some kind of underlying social message to the flick. Expect some thinly-veiled commentary on the absurdism of the failed War on Drugs.

“We comment on it pretty directly in the movie actually,” Banks adds. “Brooklyn Prince plays a 12-year-old girl in 1985 in this movie. I was a 12 year-old-girl in 1985 in real life. And, obviously, I remember DARE and Just Say No and Crack Is Whack. It’s a reaction to the whole drug epidemic that we were going through.

“I look back now and it just all seems so insane. What happened? What did we fix? I don’t know. I really wish we’d spent a lot of these resources on other things. So that’s it’s in the fabric of the movie, the ridiculousness of a bear high on cocaine because of the War on Drugs, forcing somebody to drop drugs out of an airplane is f*cking nuts.”

“This felt a little bit like the bear’s revenge story because this bear became collateral damage in that failed war.”

On working with the late Ray Liotta

Of note in Cocaine Bear is the late Ray Liotta’s final performance. Banks recalled what it was like to work with the legendary actor on the film before his untimely death in May 2022 at 67.

“Ray plays our drug kingpin. He plays Andrew Thornton’s boss. Basically, Andrew Thornton’s the guy who throws the drugs off the plane. And he wants to find his drugs. But one of the surprising things about the script for this movie is that one of the main themes of the film is parenting,” Banks shares.

“You wouldn’t know it from the trailer but, it’s really about fathers and sons and fathers and daughters. And people protecting their cubs. I really felt like that’s what Ray brought a real warmth to this. And he had a really great sense of humor about it too. He had some great zingers in the movie.”

“It really is a story about fathers and sons and parenting and taking care of each other in crazy times. That’s one of the thematics too – when things are going totally sideways, who can you count on?”

Cocaine Bear hits theaters on February 24, 2023

Brandon Wenerd is BroBible's publisher, writing on this site since 2009. He writes about sports, music, men's fashion, outdoor gear, traveling, skiing, and epic adventures. Based in Los Angeles, he also enjoys interviewing athletes and entertainers. Proud Penn State alum, former New Yorker. Email: brandon@brobible.com