“Rachel McAdams 3” by SpreePiX Berlin – flickr. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

A knife. Specifically, a Swiss Army knife.

In the current season of the acclaimed television series True Detective, Canadian actress Rachel McAdams plays Detective Antigone “Ani” Bezzerides, a dauntless character who is not easily scared despite having to deal with very dangerous situations. In real life, however, Miss McAdams was not quite as brave as Detective Bezzerides when she visited Costa Rica after wrapping up production of the hit 2004 film Mean Girls.

During a recent interview with British fashion magazine Stylist, Miss McAdams explained that she enjoys going on adventurous trips by herself, and so she headed to Australia and Costa Rica once her work on Mean Girls was finished:

I’m pretty spontaneous so I didn’t really know what I was doing.

 

I got off the flight to Costa Rica and got on a little four-seater Cessna plane and was dropped in the middle of the rainforest as the rain was pelting down. I got in a cab with no doors and asked the driver to take me to this hotel, and he told me in broken English it had burned down, so I wound up in a place costing five dollars a night.

 

There was a cold shower and guys pounding on my door all night. I slept with my Swiss Army Knife in my hand, thinking: “I’m going home tomorrow!” Of course, things always seem worse in the night.

 

I was terrified and lonely. I’ve actually never talked about this before.

Miss McAdams added that the next day she spent five hours in a taxicab that ran through the rainforest while stopping to pick up school kids and farmhands on their way to work. She explains that she visited a “volcanic black beach” and that her luggage was transported via mule to a cabin without electricity.

Based on her interview, it sounds as if Miss McAdams may have flown on Nature Air, visited the Southern Caribbean region of Costa Rica and stayed near Playa Negra in the province of Limon, but she did not specify the location. The second season of True Detective is currently airing on the cable network HBO.