A ‘90s Icon Eats Toxic Berries on TikTok, and Other News from the Week in Celebrity Peril

Celebrities! They’re just like us—but only biologically. Their lives are fundamentally different from yours and mine, and so are their problems. Exhibit A: On Tuesday night, writer Joshua Haigh reposted a TikTok in which Batman and Robin star and ‘90s icon Alicia Silverstone films herself on the street in London, England, biting into an unidentified orange fruit she’d (seemingly) picked off a bush growing through the fence around some British stranger’s yard.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to eat this,” Silverstone mused, through a mouthful of the thing she suspected she was not supposed to eat, which she said tasted “like a pepper.” Haigh then supplied the punch line, suggesting that the foraging thespian—a member, it feels relevant to note, of the do-your-own-research community, where asking the chat to weigh in on what you’ve just eaten counts as a clinical trial— had actually sampled “a very poisonous form of deadly nightshade,” and noting “she’s not posted since…rip girl you were great in clueless.” Silverstone then stopped postingI logged off that night more concerned about Alicia Silverstone’s well-being than I’d been since the first time I saw her jump off that bridge in Aerosmith’s video for “Cryin’.”

In that video, of course, it turns out she’s tethered to the bridge by a bungee cord, so she lives to dangle in midair while flipping the bird to her no-good ex-boyfriend, played by Steven Dorff. Silverstone also survived her encounter with what experts said was probably Solanum pseudocapsicum, colloquially known as the Jerusalem cherry, which does contain toxic chemicals similar to morphine and strychnine, can be dangerous to small children and pets, and can cause symptoms ranging from nausea, fever and paralysis to hallucinations and delirium, but has never documentedly killed anyone. In a proof-of-life TikTok posted on Wednesday, Silverstone wrote, “Don’t worry…I didn’t swallow,” followed by a winky-face emoji, and also a tongue-out emoji that, in this context, seemed to say, I have learned not one thing from this close call with major gastrointestinal distress and will nibble forbidden bush-fruit like a baby deer again as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

Berrygate gave us a news cycle full of poetically strange sentences— “Alicia Silverstone bit into an unknown berry she found growing in England,” wrote the Los Angeles Times in a photo caption—that felt less like news and more like Mad Libs, or possibly Kings Landing tavern gossip. The Princess Silverstone, who has raised her banner for Ser Robert the Brainwyrmed, Mover of Bear Corpses, has gone across the sea and eaten poison berries, yet she lives still! But meanwhile, in Scotland, things got even more overtly old-world supernatural this week for Guillermo del Toro. The Shape of Water director, who’s in Scotland filming a new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Jacob Elordi playing Oscar Isaac’s monster, posted on Wednesday about the “oppressive” atmosphere in his room at a circa-1800s hotel in Aberdeen. The room, del Toro wrote, was previously occupied by another member of the production team, until “odd electrical and physical occurrences” scared her into vacating.