Stars Who've Tried Ayahuasca: Chelsea Handler, Aaron Rodgers and More
Published: 2025-12-30 17:41
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Celebrities have no problem publicly sharing their experiences with ayahuasca.
Comedian Chelsea Handler famously filmed her experience while on the hallucinogenic for her 2016 Netflix docuseries, Chelsea Does. She traveled to Peru alongside her friends Dan Maurio and Jenny Mollen to meet with a shaman for an ayahuasca ceremony.
“The first time it didn’t hit me, I have a very high tolerance,” she said on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in 2016. “The second night I had to go alone with the shaman and do it again.”
Ayahuasca is traditionally used in South American cultures as a spiritual, social or medicinal process. Doing ayahuasca is usually a shaman-guided experience, where tea is brewed from the ayahuasca vine and the chacruna shrub, which contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a hallucinogenic drug. It is illegal in the United States.
Several stars have shared their experience with the drug over the years and in various interviews. Keep scrolling to see which celebs have discussed ayahuasca:
Chelsea Handler
Years after her 2016 docuseries, Handler reunited with Mollen and Maurio to reflect on their ayahuasca journey.
“I’m interested in doing it now that I’ve had therapy and my head’s in a different place,” Handler said during a 2019 episode of her “Life Will Be the Death of Me” podcast. “I, now, would like to see what I would get out of it because I bet I could go a lot deeper than I was able to then.”
Handler briefly recounted her experience on the podcast.
“It was the ability to see yourself as a child outside of yourself,” she recalled. “You’re watching yourself as a kid, but you’re not the kid, you’re just watching.”
Josh Radnor
The How I Met Your Mother star explained he did ayahuasca more than 100 times over a 10-year period.
“I’m not sure why I took so ferociously to it, but I suspect it was partly due to being rattled by the success of a television show I was on and the attendant newfound visibility and erosion of anonymity,” Radnor shared in 2020. “Ayahuasca became my refuge, a thing that felt meaningful and true at a time when meaning and truth felt in short supply.”
Miley Cyrus
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“Ayahuasca was definitely one of my favorite drugs I’ve ever done. When I did it, I asked everyone else in the room, ‘Did your entire life just change? Are you a new person?’” she told Rolling Stone in 2020 about her experience. “It was pretty crazy. I loved it, though.”
Will Smith
The actor’s 2021 memoir, Will, revealed that he had done the drug 14 times and had a self-love discovery.
“It’s about being able to find that contentment within yourself — not with external stimuli,” Smith wrote.
“I was thinking it was, like, glamping or something like that, still gonna be, like, some kind of five-star experience,” she said on Jimmy Kimmel Live! In 2021. “But you get there and you really are in the middle of the jungle, and you don’t get to eat after, like, 1 p.m. You have to walk a very far distance to get your water.”
Fox explained there was “nothing glamorous” about it.
“It’s all a part of making you vulnerable, so you sort of surrender to the experience,” she said, noting that she had different experiences all three nights. “It was incredibly intense. Everybody’s journey is different. The second night, I went to hell for eternity.”
“I’ve journeyed on ayahuasca more than once,” she shared for Us’ 25 Things You Don’t Know About Me.
Aaron Rodgers
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The NFL star detailed his ayahuasca journey in depth during his 2024 Netflix docuseries, Enigma. Rodgers explained that he has taken several trips to Costa Rica for ayahuasca ceremonies.
“I think part of the real joy in this work is there is such a feminine spirit to the ayahuasca,” the athlete said of the drug. “We can model a new way of thinking about masculinity, or what it means to be a man.”
Sterling K. Brown
The actor clarified that he and his wife did the drug in Costa Rica and there were “medical people on staff” in case anything went awry. He clarified during the 2025 Jimmy Kimmel Live!appearance that everything went as expected.
“For me, it had this very unifying idea that we are connected,” he explained. “We are all one.”
During a 2025 interview with GQ, the actor recalled his “divinely architected” ayahuasca experience.
“I had a big death experience,” he explained, noting that there was “a really traumatic feeling of holding on and holding on, and feeling a sense of unfinished business and panic.”
However, Hunnam took something very important away from the experience: to “live purely, and love, and help the people that come into your path that are in need of help.”
Judd ApatowAmy Sussman/Getty Images
The comedian recalled doing ayahuasca in his 2025 book, Comedy Nerd.
“Last year I took ayahuasca and at the end of a long trip I saw an image of Jesus on the cross which was strange since I am Jewish,” he wrote. “Instantly I understood what it meant. We are all supposed to be there for each other. Love. Brotherhood. Sacrifice. It’s as simple as that. I am not converting, but I did feel the need to buy the New Testament. I bought it on Audible.”
Teri Hatcher
“When I had this ayahuasca experience, I felt that I went to someplace that I had been before,” Hatcher said on the “Desperately Devoted” podcast in 2025. “There was definitely a feeling that I was coming home, like a welcome back. It was very perfect, energetic.”
