Zoë Kravitz almost got a bad reputation as Taylor Swift‘s house guest. During an appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers, the actress described staying in Swift’s home with her mom Lisa Bonet after evacuating during the Los Angeles wildfires in January.
“She was kind enough to let me stay at her house,” Kravitz said. “My mom lives in Topanga Canyon, so I said, ‘No, that’s a dangerous place to be. Come [here].’ And my mom has a pet snake, and so she has her evacuation stuff; she came over with the snake. We ended up having to stay there for maybe about two weeks, and Taylor has this very beautiful house. I think it’s from the ’30s, like it’s a beautiful house, something you want to preserve and take care of.”
Their stay was enjoyable until Kravitz’s last day. “I was gonna leave. My mom was actually gonna stay longer. I had to leave for work,” she recounted to host Seth Meyers. “I was kind of packing up my things, and I was saying to my mom, ‘I really wanna be a good house guest. I like to leave places better than I found them. I don’t want her to even know we were here.’ So I was kind of going around and cleaning up, and I’m downstairs and she’s upstairs and my phone rings and it’s my mom. I answered the phone and she goes, ‘Hi!’ And I’m like, ‘Your voice is super high.’ And she’s like, ‘I’m in a little bit of a pickle. Can you come upstairs?’”
Once Kravitz got to the upstairs bathroom, she learned her mom’s pet snake, named Orpheus, “found this little hole in the corner.” Meyers quipped, “But that’s a design flaw. That’s on Taylor. You can’t have a snake hole in your house.”
Things got dicey very quickly. “So the hole is next to a banquette that is built into the wall that has two drawers at the bottom,” Kravitz said. “My mom, by the way, she’s holding the snake’s tail… They’re all muscle, they’re very, very strong, so she’s holding the snake’s tail. We don’t know what to do.” She said she “started to panic” because “the snake is getting further and further” into the hole.
“It’s like that scene in Jurassic Park when they’re in the car and the branches breaking every time they move,” Kravitz explained. “I was panicking so much that my mom likes to say, ‘If I had both hands, I would have slapped you.’”
The mother and daughter called in help from Kravitz’s assistant, who also didn’t know what to do, and the manager of the house, who was not thrilled. “He gets a crowbar and starts having to tear apart this banquette,” Kravitz recalled. “We’re ripping up the tile. We’re scratching the walls. We completely destroyed Taylor’s bathroom, 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.”
She added, “So we destroyed the bathroom and I said to her house manager, ‘Obviously I’m gonna pay for everything to be fixed. Please just don’t say anything until it’s fixed, so I could just say everything’s fine.’ And I remember calling her and saying, ‘Hey — also very high voice — I wanted to talk to you about something,’ and she was like, ‘Is it the fact that you almost lost a stake in our house and destroyed my bathroom?’”