Jean Smart Recalls Zach Braff Teaching Her How to Hit a Bong on the Garden State Set

Jean Smart walked away from Garden State with a surprising new skill.

The five-time Emmy winner recently marked the film’s 20th anniversary by sharing memories of her time on set, along with writer-director-star Zach Braff, cast members Natalie Portman and Jim Parsons and others involved in making the 2004 indie dramedy, for a Hollywood Reporter oral history.

Garden State, a surprise critical and commercial hit about struggling actor Andrews “Large” Largeman (Braff) who returns to his New Jersey hometown, is perhaps best remembered for its Grammy-winning soundtrack and for essentially cementing the “manic pixie dream girl” trope — in the form of Portman’s quirky character — in the popular imagination.

But it also gave us Smart’s hilarious performance as Carol, the pot-smoking, wild-haired, recovering alcoholic mother of Large’s slacker friend Mark (Peter Sarsgaard).

“I affectionately refer to my role as ‘skank mom,’ ” Smart, 72, told THR. “I just thought the script was so amazing. I knew [Zach] was incredibly smart and clever, and I thought, ‘This will be really fun.’ ”

While “skank mom” didn’t exactly have the same cultural impact as “manic pixie dream girl,” Smart was apparently right about the atmosphere on set.

“It was just one of those sets where it was fun to just wait for the next setup,” she said.

One scene in the film required Smart’s character to smoke pot out of a bong, a skill she'd personally never acquired.

“Zach was teasing me so bad because I had never used a bong,” Smart recalled. “I can’t believe that I’m admitting that since I went to college in the ‘70s, but I had never smoked a bong. So he would make these big announcements, ‘Okay, after lunch break, I’m going to take Jean to bong school.’ ”

“I had to learn a little lesson, a bong lesson,” Smart added. “It was embarrassing.”

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For his part, Braff, 49, recalled then-girlfriend Bonnie Somerville, who had worked with Smart on the short-lived NBC sitcom In-Laws, insisting that the Designing Women star had to play Carol.

“I didn’t know Jean’s work that much at the time, but then I did a little research and I was like, ‘Wow, she’s perfect. Do you think she’d do it?’ And Jean said yes,” Braff explained. “She was pitch perfect.”

Meanwhile, Parsons, a virtual unknown in 2004 who played Carol’s much younger oddball lover, said that working with Smart was “the most exciting part” of Garden State. “Because of Designing Women, I had grown up an admirer of the things that Jean Smart was in,” said the Big Bang Theory Emmy winner, now 51. “And I also loved that I got to be the lover of somebody that Jean Smart was playing. I felt that it was absolutely absurd, and it just tickled me.”