Ed Helms ‘freaked out’ by elevator drama

The Hangover star Ed Helms discovered he was claustrophobic recently when he got stuck in an elevator at a popular Los Angeles shopping mall. The funnyman admits he started panicking when he realised he was trapped in a glass box at The Grove.
He says, “I didn’t know I was claustrophobic until the doors wouldn’t open in this elevator. I get in and the doors close. There’s, like, a mum and her two kids and then there’s like a hipster with a moustache and a fedora on his phone and it became clear that we’re stuck and we’re in a glass elevator and there’s a lot of people walking by.
“I was freaking out… It was like, ‘I’ve gotta be cool, so these kids think I’m cool and so that this hipster thinks I’m cool, and so that the 500 people walking by aren’t like: Is that the guy from The Hangover flop sweating in that elevator?’.
“I barely kept it together. (I was in there for) seven minutes… The hipster was like, ‘This is so hilarious, I am so tweeting this!’ I was like, ‘We are eating you first. That is not cool’.
“This fear just welled up in me and I thought we were gonna die. It’s not rational. And then the (technician) guy comes… and his method for rescuing us was literally just trying to open the doors. I was like, ‘We tried that’… He finally hits a lever up there and the doors open and I went home and cried.”