Jason Bateman Enlists the Use of ‘Rolling Ambien’ on His Daughter
Jason Bateman (Arrested Development/ Extract) has a special way to get his three-year-old daughter to sleep. His technique? He calls it “rolling Ambien.”
He shares a time he recently had to enlist this device on a very sleepy appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. Bateman was sleep deprived because his daughter Francesca was up at night with a cough. He dropped her off at preschool but then got a call soon after. He told Ellen:
“I get a call from the headmistress [and] she doesn’t even announce herself, she says, ‘Your daughter has a 103 degree temperature. And I mean, I didn’t know this, I swear! Francesca must have taken a turn for the worse somewhere in the morning. So I had to go back there. I pick her up, I get a hairy eyeball from everybody in the school like that I’m either dropping my kid off so they deal with her sickness or that I’m trying to infect the entire student body, both of which may have been true, but I won’t admit to any of it.”
His daughter was really uncomfortable and crying and he wanted to calm her down. So he opted to employ the before mentioned “rolling Ambien” aka the family car. “She’s starting to doze off a little bit and I figure, that’s great, because maybe she’ll get better when she sleeps.” He then heads off to the highway. “Somehow that puts her out because it pins her head back in the [car seat] as opposed to it falling forward and her waking up. So I try to carry a lot of speed and I incorporated a semi-shimmy on the wheel ’cause it gets the head going just a little bit … the whole thing of the rocking — you want to get the head moving like a bobble head.”
Ellen called him out on this questionable bonus move, he added, “I got a little carried away with it because she really started to doze off. Now people are starting to pass me and giving me looks like, ‘Oh, look who’s drinking at 10:30 in the morning,’ which was awful. I got a couple of horn honks which woke her up, so it was not a good morning.”
Forget drinking and driving, driving while under the influence of a toddler, now that can be dangerous.
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