Christina Ricci detailed the moment she and her childhood friends received an explicit photo in the mail.
During the Thursday, April 10, episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, Ricci, 45, revealed she had been 11 years old when she and her girlfriends’ prank calls to a stranger went horribly wrong.
The Yellowjackets star told Kimmel, 57, that in 1991, she and her friends “would all call 1800-MATRESS,” for fun during sleepovers.
“We prank called them so much, we ended up having a regular guy that we would talk to named Jarred and … we would talk to Jarred,” Ricci said. “Finally, one of these idiot girls gave Jarred her address and he sent a picture of his penis. In the mail.”
Ricci, who made her film debut in Mermaids alongside Winona Ryder and Cher in 1990, expressed her shock at the unexpected delivery. “It was a printed out photo developed at the CVS photo shop or something, you know … and he said ‘I want to send this to that group of 11 year olds that keep calling me’,” she said before adding that none of the friends told anybody about the incident.
“We just stopped calling,” Ricci said before a shocked Kimmel concluded that the man “gets an A for effort … also gets a P for pervert,” to which Ricci agreed. “It was certainly the first dick pic I saw.”
Ricci, who shares a son, Freddie, 10, with ex James Heerdegen, and a daughter, Cleo, 3, with husband Mark Hampton, spent the early 1990s cementing her child star status. One year after starring in Mermaids, Ricci portrayed Wednesday Addams in 1991’s The Addams Family. In 1993, she reprised her role in the film’s subsequent Addams Family Values, before appearing in both Casper and Now and Then in 1995.
She told Conan O’Brien on the Monday, April 7, episode of his “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast that she struggled to enjoy her fame as a child. “Just because people, they’ll follow you all the way home,” Ricci explained. “And I lived by myself, and that felt very threatening.”
Ricci detailed how she would avoid going home when she suspected somebody may be following her. “I found there was a liquor store on the corner. Rick was this guy who always worked in there, and he was always smoking a cigarette,” she said. “He’s the only person I would ever let call me Chris. And If anyone ever followed me, I’d pull into the liquor store, and I’d go tell Rick, and Rick would come out and chase them off.”
The actress’ glittering career was recently commemorated on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with Ricci, Hampton and Ricci’s two children accompanying her at the unveiling ceremony.
