David Cross Admits to Snorting Cocaine at the White House Correspondents Dinner

A writer and performer on the series, Cross created "Mr. Show With Bob and David" with Odenkirk and worked with fellow "Cable Guy" bit player Jack Black on his "Tenacious D" series. He co-wrote and starred in "Run Ronnie Ron," a collaboration with Odenkirk and Troy Miller, and turned up in "Arrested Development" and the Apatow-produced "Year One."

UPDATED: The IFC star confesses to doing the drug under a table at the Correspondents' Dinner in 2009.

Fact: David Cross once snorted cocaine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

The actor confessed to the persistent rumor in an interview in the March issue of Playboy magazine, saying he pulled the stunt while sitting some 65 feet away from President Obama.

"It wasn’t even that much cocaine. It was literally the size of, I don’t know, a tick. It was a tiny granule of coke that I put on my wrist and said, 'Watch this. I need a witness,'" Cross recalled.

"And then I ducked under the table and did it. It wasn’t like I got high," he continued. "The jolt was similar to licking an empty espresso cup. It wasn’t about that. It was just about being able to say that I did it, that I did cocaine in the same room as the president."

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Cross, the star of the IFC series The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, recently took heat for his rant against a producer on Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, a film he's vilified in public as "most miserable experience I ever had in my professional life."

As for the White House incident, Cross said he's not "ashamed" but regrets the embarrassment it caused his fiancee, actress Amber Tamblyn, who had invited him to the dinner.

"I was her date, her plus-one, and she got dragged through the mud because of what I did. She had nothing to do with it. And because of that she’ll never be invited to the White House again. That’s not cool."

Another Cross confession: he remains "curious" about new recreational drugs, and considers crack to be wack.

"I smoked it once, and it was a huge wake-up call ... When it came time to get some more, I knew very clearly that if I stayed there—and I wanted to—my life would change right then and there for the worse. I never touched crack again."



