Tiffany Haddish Reveals How DUI Arrest Helped Her Career
“I’m sorry but you ain’t lived ’til you got arrested in Beverly Hills,” the comedian joked at the time.
River Callaway/WWD via Getty Images
Tiffany Haddish is actually really happy she got that DUI.
The comedian, who got noticed in Hollywood after her breakout role in Girls Trip in 2017 alongside Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, and Jada Pinkett Smith, told Dana Carvey and David Spade on their Fly On The Wall podcast that her 2023 arrest was the best thing to happen to her career as it made her “internationally known.”
“You know it’s funny, because I’d prayed to God to give me a way to show these studios that I am internationally known and I could be in a film that’s for international purposes,” she said on the show. “‘Cause I was told I wasn’t internationally known enough. And then I took a nap in Beverly Hills.” She then clarified, “I took a nap in a car in Beverly Hills and the police came.”
Haddish was arrested Thanksgiving weekend in 2023 after Beverly Hills authorities received a call about a woman slumped over the steering wheel of her car in the middle of the road. Her vehicle was not in motion at the time, however. She told ET that her Tesla self-parked after she fell asleep, blocking the road.
Those charges were dropped in February, but she still faces a DUI case from an arrest in Georgia the previous year. She’s since sworn off drinking at the advisement of a court order stemming from the arrests and vowed to “get help” so “this will never happen again.”
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She joked of her time in the Beverly Hills prison in December, “I’m sorry but you ain’t lived ’til you got arrested in Beverly Hills. It’s beautiful over there. I’ve been in quite a few jails, and if you’re gonna do something, I say get arrested over there ’cause that jail is nice.”
Apparently not only did she have a “nice” time in jail, she’s also grateful for the boost in fame. “I was so shocked when I came home,” she said on Fly On The Wall. “I was on KTLA, NBC, CBS, Fox, PBS, CNN, I was on ESPN, BBC—‘I was like, ESPN, I’m not even an athlete!’” Haddish said the incident made her “very famous,” which she thought was “kinda awesome.”
She’d been wanting to show the Hollywood powers-that-be she had star power, she said, and being arrested for yet another DUI charge seemed to do the trick. “I prayed for a way to show the studios [I was famous enough to take on bigger roles],” she added. “I didn’t know it was gonna be like this though.”
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