Just a bunch of hocus smoke-us? Omri Katz says he was high while filming the 1993 Halloween movie “Hocus Pocus.” The actor was 16 years old when he shot the Disney classic alongside Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy, Vinessa Shaw and Thora Birch. “That was at an age where I started experimenting with cannabis. Let’s just say, some of those scenes, I was having a good old time,” Katz told Entertainment Weekly in a new interview.
He didn’t recall which scenes but remembered “misperforming and not hitting my keys or marks” when director Kenny Ortega asked him if he was stoned. “He was like, ‘Are you high?’ and I was like, ‘No,’ and of course, I was,” Katz admitted.
Shaw, who sat down for an EW roundtable to mark the film’s new sequel, “Hocus Pocus 2,” said she remembered Ortega confronting Katz during a scene at the beginning of the movie when the witch Winifred Sanderson (Midler) zaps Max (Katz) with green magic. (No, not the marijuana kind of green magic.) “I didn’t look like I was getting zapped,” Katz said. “I looked like I was getting high.” Katz, who retired from acting after appearing in TV shows like “Dallas” and “Eerie, Indiana” and the movie “Matinee,” said he wasn’t asked to be involved in the Disney+ sequel. He reportedly now runs The Mary Danksters, a cannabis company.
