Retta Recalls The Real-Life Robbery That Took Place While Filming Good Girls

"Good Girls," the crime comedy-drama series everyone binges on Netflix, features many different robbery scenes. The dramedy focuses on three suburban female friends from Michigan who become involved in crime in order to financially provide for their children. Throughout the series, Ruby Hill (Retta), Beth Boland (Christina Hendricks), and Annie Marks (Mae Whitman) rob and scam various businesses, such as grocery stores and spas, as well as individuals. They also launder gang money, print counterfeit cash, and commit a series of other crimes to generate income for their struggling families. Although some of the crime scenes in "Good Girls" may appear action-packed to viewers, the filming of these scenes was, of course, typically not actually dangerous.

However, sometimes emergencies do happen while filming, and it can create some very confusing, stressful, and chaotic situations. In fact, there are many actors who injured their co-stars during filming, as well as bizarre ways people have died while filming a movie. Fortunately, none of these things happened while filming "Good Girls," but there was an actual, real-life robbery that took place during the filming of the show, and specifically during the filming of a robbery scene, strangely enough.

On "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," Retta recalled how they were filming a scene where Ruby, Beth, and Annie rob a grocery store, when an actual, real-life robbery broke out at the store next to it. Retta said, "They were like, 'We're gonna use their cover.'" According to "The Wrap," Christina Hendricks told a similar story at the Television Critics Association press tour in 2018, except Hendricks was briefly away from the set when the robbery took place, and received a phone call warning her about it. 

The double robbery got confusing. At first, Retta did not understand that there was an actual robbery occurring; she thought everything was part of the show. The staff said, "Everybody down!" and "Stand down! There's a real robbery," and Retta thought, "Bro, relax ... I'm gonna need you to settle." It seemed like perhaps the staff was just trying a trick to get the actors in a mood for the robbery scene. 

However, once they realized there was an actual robbery, the cast of "Good Girls," who were dressed as robbers, did not want anyone to think they were committing the robbery. Retta said they were "taking off our stuff so we didn't get caught up, like, thinking we were doing it. Passing our guns to props like, 'that's not us, homey.' ... It was stressful." Stressful indeed.