Mackenzie Phillips says lunch-break cocaine sessions hit One Day at a Time
mackenzie phillips said she and Valerie Bertinelli used cocaine and drank wine during lunch breaks while filming One Day at a Time. She said the routine included driving to her house, getting in the pool, and using coke in the dressing room, a blunt reminder that the sitcom’s off-camera behavior was far messier than its family-friendly image.
Phillips on the dressing room
“So this might surprise you that during lunch break, Valerie and I would drive to my house, get in the pool, drink wine, and snort coke,” Phillips said in the interview. She added, “We would do coke together in the dressing room and stuff. I just happened to be the one that got caught. And thank God I got caught, you know?”
Bertinelli's separate admission
Bertinelli has already discussed her own past drug use publicly. On the Literally With Rob Lowe podcast, she said, “I am a prude now but I [partook] as well for a few years there until I just couldn't take it anymore. Cocaine was everywhere and easy to get,” placing her account in line with Phillips’ description of how routine the drug use had become around production.
Phillips also said she was the one who got caught and that she had addiction that Bertinelli did not have. That split matters because it explains why the same set of habits ended one woman’s tenure on the show and left the other to talk about the period years later as part of a wider public record.
Leave, removal, and fallout
Phillips eventually took a leave of absence and was cut from the show because of her own struggles. Bertinelli, meanwhile, has used her public comments to connect her drug history to a broader pattern of coping, saying, “We all have a toolbox that we go to when we need to suppress any kind of emotion that we don't want to feel, any kind of pain that we don't want to feel.”
Her comments also reached back to Eddie Van Halen, whose addiction led to their divorce. “I know that Ed's toolbox was full of drugs and alcohol,” she said. In 2020, he died from throat cancer at age 65, and the old interview details now sit alongside a newly explicit account of how much drug use was taking place during One Day at a Time.
