Michael O'Keefe Says Cocaine Was 'Budgeted' on the Caddyshack Set, Admits Filming High

Michael O'Keefe confirmed what Hollywood insiders have whispered about for 45 years. Cocaine wasn't just around on the set of Caddyshack. According to O'Keefe, it was in the budget.

In an interview with Page Six published Friday, October 2, the 71-year-old actor said the drug was treated as a routine production expense during the film's 1979 shoot in Florida.

"There was some miscellaneous item," O'Keefe said, describing how the cost got buried in the paperwork.

"It was the 70s," he said. "That's what was happening back then. People were just treating it like it was toothpaste, and you had to do it twice a day to stay healthy."

Caddyshack filmed over 11 weeks in the fall of 1979 and hit theaters in 1980. The cast included Ted Knight, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray and Rodney Dangerfield, with O'Keefe playing caddy Danny Noonan at the fictional Bushwood Country Club.

He Admits He Filmed High

O'Keefe didn't just describe the atmosphere. He admitted he used cocaine himself before shooting certain scenes, and says watching that footage now bothers him.

"It was not my favorite memory because in retrospect I can see those moments on camera and I'm not too happy about them," he told Page Six.

But he says the experience scared him straight, fast.

"I can report to you that right after that movie, during that movie, was the last time I ever did anything like cocaine," O'Keefe said. "I realized that it was a terrible thing to get involved with, and like so many things in the drug world, it looked like fun, but in reality, it wasn't."

Doug Kenney's Death Was the Breaking Point

O'Keefe points to one specific event as the reason he walked away: the death of Doug Kenney, Caddyshack's co-writer and producer, in 1980. Kenney died at 33 after falling from a cliff in Hawaii. His death was ruled a suicide.

O'Keefe called it "a huge wake-up call."

"[He was] one of the most affable, intelligent, funny people in the world," O'Keefe said. "Was strung out on cocaine, got depressed, and committed suicide. It was truly a result of drug addiction, and that was a huge wake-up call."

No coroner's report or additional named source in these interviews independently confirms the specific role cocaine played in Kenney's mental state at the time, but O'Keefe has been consistent in linking the two.

A Long Career Beyond Bushwood

Before Caddyshack, O'Keefe earned an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor for 1979's The Great Santini. He went on to star in Ironweed and Frozen River, and more recently played Ron Cooper, father of Jon Hamm's character, on Apple TV's Your Friends & Neighbors. He's currently appearing in A Break in the Rain, directed by Don Scardino, playing a widower who hits the road with a Nashville singer after a decade of grief.

O'Keefe has also talked before about how Caddyshack shaped, and sometimes limited, how people see him. In a 2020 interview with Yahoo, he recalled a wardrobe designer telling him her father watched the movie with family every night during his final six weeks battling leukemia. That story, he said, changed how he felt about being tied to the role for life.

What's Confirmed, What's Not

Every outlet covering this story, including Fox News, Yahoo News, WFMD, Reality Tea, Head Topics and Globe Magazine, is relaying the same Page Six interview rather than independent reporting. One outlet, Reality Tea, added an unattributed claim that a behind-the-scenes documentary separately "examined the heavy drinking and drug use" on set, but did not name the documentary or cite it directly, so that detail stands apart from O'Keefe's own on-record account.

No studio, producer, or other surviving cast member has publicly confirmed or disputed O'Keefe's specific claim that cocaine was literally itemized in the production budget. The claim rests on O'Keefe's own recollection, 45 years after the fact.