Drew Starkey Got Pulled Over by Actual Police During a ‘Lucky’ Filming Scene — and the Cop’s Question Was Priceless

Drew Starkey has a story from the set of Apple TV+’s Lucky that perfectly illustrates what happens when a film crew goes too far out of frame during a long-lens shoot — and it involves real police lights, a very confused officer, and a stunt double who figured out the situation considerably faster than her co-star.

Starkey, known from Outer Banks and Queer, shared the incident during a joint interview with PEOPLE alongside the show’s lead, Anya Taylor-Joy. The scene in question involved Starkey and Hayley Wright — Taylor-Joy’s stunt double — bursting out of a garage in a car and tearing across a long stretch of beach during what was supposed to be a straightforward driving sequence.

The Moment Everything Went Wrong

The car reached its end mark on the sand — and that’s when Starkey noticed lights flashing behind them. His first instinct, he admitted with obvious amusement, was that the production had added police vehicles to the scene without telling him. He was looking at the lights and genuinely thinking they were part of the shot.

Wright figured it out much faster. She told him they were being pulled over. They were.

A police officer approached the driver’s side and informed them that no vehicles were permitted on the beach. Wright explained that they were filming a movie and apologized. The officer looked around — and asked the question that encapsulates the entire situation perfectly.

“Where are the cameras?”

It was a fair question. The scene was being captured on a long lens, with the crew positioned far enough away that from ground level, there was no visible evidence of a production anywhere in the vicinity. Starkey and Wright were sitting on a beach in a car with no cameras, no crew, and no obvious explanation for why they were there.

Fortunately, production assistants saw what was happening and sprinted across the sand to clarify the situation before it escalated further. Taylor-Joy added her own commentary on the exchange, noting that telling a police officer mid-confrontation that what he just witnessed wasn’t real is one of the more challenging things a person can be asked to do in that moment.

Anya Taylor-Joy on the Show Itself

Taylor-Joy plays Luciana “Lucky” Armstrong, a con artist at the center of the Apple TV+ series. She also used the PEOPLE interview to reflect on how she approaches the distinction between film and television work — or rather, how she doesn’t. She described treating every project with the same interior process and the same depth of preparation regardless of the format.

The primary difference she acknowledged between the two mediums was simply time — the number of hours a limited series or television show allows with a character compared to a feature film. Some stories benefit from compression, she said. Others need the room to unfold slowly, and those are the stories that belong on television.

Lucky is currently streaming on Apple TV+.