Actor Jason Schwartzman was left mortified while filming his hit TV comedy Bored To Death on the streets of New York after experiencing a close encounter with a rat.
Schwartzman, who portrays a writer moonlighting as an unlicensed private detective on the cult show, was shooting a scene last year (10) in a trendy part of Brooklyn with co-star Ted Danson when a large rodent hit him from behind.
He explains, "We were shooting in Williamsburg and it was a scene with Ted and I in a high school and we were shooting it in a stairwell and I heard this commotion above me, which I thought was people. The director goes, 'Please be quiet everybody'.
"So we keep going with the scene but I still hear, like, (a sound) and I'm thinking, 'What is that? This is strange', and then all of a sudden I hear someone running down the stairs and then I realise, no, that's a cat because I can hear the paws, then this thing hits me really hard in the back and it was too small to be a cat, but too big to be a mouse.
"It was all happening so quickly, and then I realised, welcome to New York - it was a rat!"