CGI and digital effects have come a long way over the years, but sometimes, there’s nothing like the real thing — or a super realistic version of it. But practical effects can get pretty gross, and sometimes, nasty things just so happen to happen on set.
Here are 40 super gross behind-the-scenes facts from TV shows and movies:
1.
For the scene in The Paperboy where Jack gets stung by a jellyfish, Nicole Kidman peed on Zac Efron for real. Director Lee Daniels told Vulture, “We just went for it and never thought twice about it, because it made sense for the film. It was what it was. I think that I became more nervous about it in the edit room, and I thought, I’’ not actually going to show this, right? Is it vulgar? And I called Nicole and said, ‘I don’t know,’ and she said, ‘Lee, you made me pee on Zac Efron. If you don’t put it in the movie, you need to man up.’ And I was like, ‘All right, I ain’t gonna pussy out! Okay.'”
2.
For the Euphoria Season 2 hot tub scene, they used a mix of CGI and practical effects to make it look like Cassie was projectile vomiting everywhere. Sydney Sweeney told Hot Ones, “They had to get a pump, and they had this pipe that they just taped and hid on my body. And then they CGI’d it out up my neck, and then there was a horse bit that I had to put in my mouth. So during that scene, they’re filling my mouth with throw up. And then I opened my mouth, and it just started shooting out my mouth. It was the most disgusting thing I ever experienced.”
3.
For the The Wolf of Wall Street scene where Jordan gives Donnie CPR, they used lube to stick the ham Donnie coughed up to Leonardo DiCaprio’s face. Leo told The Ellen DeGeneres Show, “We were doing this CPR sequence, and, you know, the big challenge that day, we had to do 70 takes because they couldn’t get this ham to stick on my face. And they had to put K-Y Jelly, and there’s literally a guy there behind this giant window with a plastic spoon just flicking ham on my face all day long as I’m doing this insane sequence. But it was almost, it was one of the most surreal things I’ve ever done in my entire career.”
4.
While filming the castle storming scene in The Princess Bride, André the Giant let out such a massive fart that his costar Cary Elwes still remembered it decades later. Cary told Live with Kelly and Ryan, “André goes, ‘I guess not very long’… and he lets out the the most monumental fart. I mean, no, for real, like, insane, like, defeaning. We all still have tinnitus in one ear. The whole plywood set was shaking, and the sound guy lifted his headphones off his ears and like was [shaking his head]. And it went on for — somebody timed it! It was 16 seconds! And it went up. It had variations…And his face! I made the mistake of looking over at him, and he had this beautiful smile on his face and rocking to and fro like he was letting something go that he’d been holding on forever…And when it was over, there was a stunned silence.”
5.
For the Game of Thrones Season 1 scene where Daenerys eats a stallion heart, they “made the heart out of solidified jam, but it tasted like bleach and raw pasta.” Emilia Clarke “ate roughly 28 hearts” throughout filming. She told the Mirror, “It was very helpful to be given something so truly disgusting to eat, so there wasn’t much acting required… Fortunately, they gave me a spit bucket because I was vomiting in it quite often.”
In the DVD commentary, executive producer D.B. Weiss said, “There was no need to tell Emilia anything about how gruesome a task it was to choke down a horse heart. Apparently, eating several pounds of gummy bear heart is almost as gruesome as the real thing…It really needed to provide some visible resistance when she bites into it. We settled on the same mature of gelatin gummy bears are made of, and it worked wonderfully — right up until the moment Emilia almost threw up.”
6.
Another fact about the horse heart scene: Emilia was covered in so much sticky fake blood that, when she used the bathroom, she got stuck to the toilet seat! On Jimmy Kimmel Live, she said, “I was kind of covered head to toe in the fake blood. And I’m kind of continually sticking myself, to myself or to other things.”
7.
To prepare for the Gone Girl scene where her character, Amy, slits Desi’s throat during sex, Rosamund Pike practiced using a blade on a pig. She told Collider, ” I always get worried about anything physical, like the action sequences. Neil Patrick Harris and I had to do a violent scene. If you’re going to do something like that, you have to do it with a certain degree of accuracy. I had no idea how much force you needed to slice someone’s throat. I actually went to a butcher and asked them if they wouldn’t mind me just using a box cutter on a pig carcass, just to understand what it would be like. They let me do it, so anyone buying meat that day would have seen me behind the counter, with serious intent, finding out the mechanics of doing that. That was purely for research purposes.”
8.
For Vampire’s Kiss, Nicolas Cage told director Robert Bierman, “The thing I hate most in the world are cockroaches. They are my Room 101. … So let me eat a cockroach.” The director readily made it happen, and the actor munched a cockroach on camera. Robert told the Ringer, “He wanted to eat the most frightening thing for him. I thought, ‘This is terrific!’ I sent my prop people down into the boiler room. … They brought me a box, divided up into little sections with tissue paper. The cockroaches were there lined up for me to cast. I think they’re actually called water bugs — they’re bigger than cockroaches.” Nic said, “I really [wanted] to do something that would shock the audience, something you would never forget.”
Before shooting the scene, producer Barbara Zitwer made them consult a doctor to ensure he wouldn’t get sick. The doctor told them, “No. But have him drink some whiskey right after.” So, they had the actor wash his mouth out with 100-proof vodka after each take. They only did two takes, but Nic actually ingested the bug both times. Co-producer Barry Shils lied to an animal rights group and said that they were still alive.
9.
Per the Toronto Star, Psycho was the first movie that showed a toilet flushing onscreen, which was a violation of the Hays Code, the strict censorship guidelines that governed films at the time.
An interesting bonus fact – the movie also broke the guidelines for showing sex by opening on Sam and Marion having just hooked up during her lunch break. Historian/critic David Thomson told the Toronto Star, “Psycho just seems to say, ‘fuck you’ to the Code. I think all over the world there was a feeling that, ‘My God, it breaks down as easily as that.’ And when censorship broke in the movies, it broke down rather quickly. You can trace it throughout the ’60s. Psycho was a key step.”
10.
According to Screen Rant, Will Ferrell had to film the Elf breakfast spaghetti scene twice because he actually had to eat Buddy’s candy concoction, and during the first take, he puked. Additionally, the extreme amount of sugar gave him a migraine.
11.
To get in character for Jungle Fever, Halle Berry “didn’t shower or take a bath for like two weeks.” On The Rosie O’Donnell Show, she said, “Nobody said anything to me, but everybody sort of started to keep their distance. It was an experience. That was my attempt at method acting.”
12.
While filming the cannibalism scene in Yellowjackets Season 2, the actors had to eat fake human meat made out of rice paper and jackfruit. Sophie Nélisse told BuzzFeed News, “We were pulling out the rice paper, and it was all soggy. We were like, ‘This is the grossest thing ever.’ It just tasted disgusting.” It was so nasty that Samantha Hanratty vomited. Courtney Eaton added, “They should have sprayed some hamburger smell or something.”
13.
Star Trek: The Next Generation actor Jonathan Frakes told Entertainment Weekly that he “once ate a live grub worm” for an episode. He revealed this after saying that his favorite Klingon food is gagh, which is serpent worms.
14.
While The Last Man on Earth Season 1 was in production, they shot the scene where Carol eats beans in bed before her sex scene with Philip. After a bit of an internal struggle, actor Kristen Schaal told costar Will Forte, “I’m gonna fart on you” — and she did. On Late Night with Seth Meyers, Kristen said, “Will never breaks, and we both sort of take a lot of pride in our determination to never break. I broke that man! I farted on him, he broke, and then he tried to tell the crew it was his fart because he’s such a saint. And I was like, ‘No, it’s mine.’ Like, I own my farts. And then I farted on him again, and then…I wanted to call the union, ’cause you don’t fill a lady up with beans, lay her flat on her tummy, and tell her to yell!”
15.
Per Screen Rant, while filming the Oldboy scene where his character, Oh Dae-su, eats a live octopus, Choi Min-sik reportedly consumed four live octopi — despite the fact that he’s vegetarian.
16.
I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! Season 19 contestant Jacqueline Jossa told Lorraine that, during the finale, a spider peed in her mouth. She said, “It was awful. It was literally dripping in my mouth. Honestly, awful. I couldn’t even speak — I wanted to be like, ‘Ohh it’s weeing in my mouth.'”
17.
According to Newsweek, in the Night of the Living Dead scene where the zombies feast after a truck explosion, the “human remains” were made of ham and sheep organs — courtesy of an investor who was also the owner of a meatpacking plant — doused in chocolate syrup.
To make things wilder, a lot of the zombies weren’t even professional actors. Production couldn’t get enough extras, so they recruited crew members, investors, friends, and even random bystanders. Investor/co-screenwriter John A. Russo told Newsweek, “Our commercial clients surprised us, because they were straight up-and-down, suit-and-tie people, I mean, they were ultra-conservative. But some of the ad agent presidents were the ones biting into those animal parts.”
18.
While filming the The Walking Dead Season 2 episode where they pull a zombie out of a well, IronE Singleton was so disgusted by the zombie that he could barely make it through the scene. At Wizard World 2020, he said, “That thing was so nasty. I was gagging because we were out in a dirt field and there was a lot of dust being kicked up after every take, and then that mixed with the fact that this zombie was so disgusting.” It was worsened by the recent memory of his costar Norman Reedus looking at his breakfast sausage and asking, “What is that? Poop?”
IronE continued, “So I had those two images in my head along with all this dust coming up. And Billy [Gierhart], who was our director on that show, he walked over to me, and I couldn’t stop gagging throughout the scene. He said, ‘IronE, I like the gag, but let’s try something else. Let’s do it a little differently.’ I was like, ‘’I can’t help it, man! The dust is in my throat; I’m looking at this disgusting walker.'”
19.
A particularly emotional kiss scene in WandaVision resulted in what Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany have dubbed “Snotgate.” They were filming in the cold, and one of their noses started running, getting snot on both of them — but neither of them will admit to being the culprit. Paul told Entertainment Weekly, “She’ll tell you a crock of shit about whose snot it was. I know the truth, and people shouldn’t be fooled by her story.” Elizabeth replied, “When he has that makeup on, he can’t really feel his leaking fluids anyway, like I can. I was like, ‘You can’t even tell you’re snotting! I can! You can’t feel your face ’cause it’s covered in paint!'”
20.
The Mad Men wardrobe department gave Alison Brie underwear that looked like “biker shorts that go all the way up to your ribs” with a “small hole” for going to the bathroom. On the Life Is Short podcast, she said, “I didn’t know for the first season that you weren’t supposed to wear underwear under them because they are underwear… So I was rushing to set — Mad Men was my first real job, so I didn’t ever want to be the problem person… [I] tried to pull the hole open, but I didn’t pull my underwear to the side, so I’m peeing and not hearing it hit the bowl, and then I just feel warmth. It was full pee… I just dabbed it with a bunch of toilet paper. Because they’re waiting on me! I’m not allowed to be that person here… I’m a recurring guest star, I don’t want to lose my job.”
However, after a few takes, Janie Bryant, the costume designer, realized Alison was having issues and helped her resolve it. She also assured her that it wasn’t the first time something like that had happened.
21.
In The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, the fish that Andy Serkis bit into during his transformation from Smeagol to Gollum was made of gelatin, which “in all honesty tasted more disgusting than biting into a raw fish.” He told TheOneRing.net, “They made a few gelatin models which I had to bite into…I would rather have eaten a raw fish.”
22.
While filming The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface, was forbidden from washing his costume. He wore it for 12 hours a day in heat that reached over 100 degrees. In a 2000 documentary, Gunnar said, “I was the smelliest element of the set.”
23.
Another gross fact fromThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre — according to the Telegraphyou, in the scene where Grandpa sucks blood from Sally’s finger, they were meant to use a fake knife that dispensed fake blood. However, when the prop didn’t work, Gunnar cut actor Marilyn Burns’s finger, and John Dugan unknowingly sucked on her real blood. Neither John nor Marilyn knew the truth about the scene for years afterwards.
24.
One last fact from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — per the Telegraph, when they filmed the final family dinner scene, the table was set with real rotting animal carcasses. They shot for 26 hours straight in the 100-plus degree heat, causing many people to run out for fresh air between takes.
Dorothy Pearl, the makeup artist, was tasked with trying to slow down the rotting by injecting formaldehyde into the food. She almost injected it in her own leg when she missed and stabbed herself on accident. She told the Telegraph, “That meat was old, it was rotten, it was putrid, it was terrible. But I believe that the dire circumstances added to the film. If we’d been comfy, if everybody had their own trailer, I’m not so sure you’d feel the horror in quite the way you do. None of us were happy. We were miserable.”
25.
The fish that Danny DeVito ate in Batman Returns was a raw bluefish. Plenty of people eat raw fish in sushi, but what made his experience nasty was the fact that “in the middle of the action, [he] would squeeze a mixture of mouthwash and spirulina into [his] mouth.” He told the Daily Telegraph, “But that was because I needed to ooze this green, kind of black, thickish liquid out of the corners.”
26.
While filming the Friends episode “The One Where Ross Got High,” Matt LeBlanc accidentally ate some of David Schwimmer’s regurgitated trifle (which was really bananas and whipped cream). On The Graham Norton Show, Matt said, “There was too much on his plate. So he starts to eat it all, and he starts laughing, and we cut. We’re cutting, and he spits it back on his plate. I’m sitting right next to him, and I’m looking the other way. I didn’t see him spit it back on his plate. So, I take his plate…and I scrape some on my plate… We go again, and now I’m eating it. We finish the take. No one says anything to me.”
27.
When The Office actor Angela Kinsey filmed kissing scenes, her onscreen boyfriend Rainn Wilson “was usually eating something disgusting right beforehand.” On her Office Ladies podcast, Angela said, “And I’d be like, ‘Rainn, dang it. Do you have to eat a tuna fish sandwich right before we’re supposed to kiss? Come on!'” She also said that his eating habits “made it difficult for” her to film their kissing scenes.
28.
While The Boys cast was filming inside the whale for Season 2, it was “90 degrees outside, and 120 degrees inside the whale,” and “the blood, of course, was attracting all sorts of insects.” Laz Alonso told TV Guide, “Jack [Quaid} and I would get stuck to the whale guts. When we were in there shooting our scene, at the end of the scene, we would have to get up and walk out of the whale, and there were a couple of takes where we would try to get up, but our bodies, literally our skin, were stuck to the whale because the sugar-coated red stuff would dry up during the scene.”
29.
While filming the Spawn scene where Clown eats maggot pizza, John Leguizamo said, “Fuck it, I’ll eat it! Don’t bring out the plastic things, it’s not going to have the same effect when you cut to something and they’re not moving.” He told CBR, “I ate the maggots, and it was disgusting, and I only did one take. I said, ‘I’m not doing any repeats, so you better get this shit right because if I’m out of focus, fuck you, I’m leaving.'” On Twitter, he also said that he “only swallowed a few.”
30.
According to the Independent, the temple set for Apocalypse Now was so stinky and covered with garbage that Janet Sheen, Martin Sheen’s wife, told producer Gray Frederickson, “You’ve got to clean this up. It’s a health risk. I won’t allow Marty to work here.” So, he spoke to production designer Dean Tavoularis, who argued that the dead rats gave it “real atmosphere.” Gray also heard another prop department member say, “Wait till he hears about the dead bodies.”
31.
Additionally, the Apocalypse Now prop department had been storing real corpses in a tent behind where the cast and crew ate. When producer Gray Frederickson found out, he told them, “You guys are nuts. Where did these come from? We’ve got to get rid of this immediately.” However, they refused, saying, “No, no, they’ll be very authentic, we’ll have them upside down in the trees.” He replied, “You can’t do that!” The situation landed the production in legal hot water when it turned out their supplier was a grave robber. Gray told the Independent, “The police showed up on our set and took all of our passports. They didn’t know we hadn’t killed these people because the bodies were unidentified. I was pretty damn worried for a few days. But they got to the truth and put the guy in jail.”
Soldiers arrived to take the bodies away. Gray told the outlet, “I don’t know what they did with them. So for the scenes in the movie, we had extras hanging from trees, not dead bodies.”
32.
While filming the prom scene in Carrie, Sissy Spacek wanted the blood on her dress to look consistent from day to day, so, for three days, she slept in the bloody dress in a trailer behind MGM Studios. Her costar P.J. Soles told Vulture, “I was like, ‘You’re amazing that you would wanna sleep in that sticky, icky stuff.’ And she was like, ‘No, it’s gotta match, I want it to look great.'”
33.
For the scene in Poltergeist where Diane falls into the excavated pool, actor JoBeth Williams was swimming through the muck with real skeletons — which she thought were just fake props until years later. She told Vanity Fair, “I always assumed that the skeletons were made by the prop department. A few years later, I ran into one of the special effects guys, and I said, ‘You guys making all those skeletons, that must have been really amazing.’ He said, ‘Oh, we didn’t make them, those were real.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yeah, they were real skeletons.’ … I don’t know where they were bought from, but that really grossed me out. I’m glad I didn’t know that then, because I would’ve really been screaming a lot — for real.”
34.
Reflecting on filming Rosemary’s Baby in her memoir, What Falls Away, Mia Farrow wrote, “When Roman [Polanski, the director] wanted me to eat raw liver, I ate it, take after take, even though, at the time, I was a committed vegetarian.”
35.
About six or seven takes into filming the Django Unchained scene where his character, Calvin J. Candie, snaps, Leonardo DiCaprio accidentally smashed a glass, and his “hand started really pouring blood all over the table.” The glass “disintegrated into his hand,” yet he continued without flinching. That’s the take that made it into the movie. Leo told The Hollywood Reporter, “Maybe they thought it was done with special effects. I wanted to keep going. It was more interesting to watch [director Quentin Tarantino’s and costar Jamie Foxx’s] reaction off-camera than to look at my hand. We did it bloodied and bandaged for the rest of the movie. I’m glad Quentin kept it in.”
36.
For Leonardo DiCaprio, playing Hugh Glass in The Revenant was physically grueling. After rehearsals, the cast and crew spent nine months filming in freezing Canada and Argentina, “in an all-natural environment, succumbing to whatever nature gave [them].” However, the actor took his performance even further. In 2015, he told Yahoo, “I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. Whether it’s going in and out of frozen rivers, or sleeping in animal carcasses, or what I ate on set. [I was] enduring freezing cold and possible hypothermia constantly…I certainly don’t eat raw bison liver on a regular basis. When you see the movie, you’ll see my reaction to it, because Alejandro [G. Iñárritu, the director] kept it in. It says it all. It was an instinctive reaction.”
He also said, “The truth is that I knew what I was getting into. This was a film that had been floating around for quite some time, but nobody was crazy enough to really take this on, simply because of the logistics of where we needed to shoot and the amount of work and rehearsal that would have to be done to achieve Alejandro and [cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s] vision. They’re very specific about their shots and what they want to achieve, and that…was something that became more of a profoundly intense chapter of our lives than we ever thought it was going to be.”
37.
For the Rescue Dawn scene where the prisoners are given worms for dinner, they used real maggots — and Christian Bale really ate them. He told Collider, “They were very real. I didn’t mind eating the maggots, but I just wanted to make sure about where the maggots had come from. Where did they find those maggots?”
38.
Bachelor in Paradise bartender Wells Adams told TV Line, “This is something that people don’t realize: All of those day beds that everyone goes and, like, sits on and stuff? Those get wet and then inevitably get moldy-smelling. By the end of the season, those daybeds are nasty. If you’ve gotten to the end there, and you’re about to get engaged, uh, you’re avoiding those.”
39.
According to Screen Rant, for the scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Andy finds a maggot in his food and Brooks feeds it to the baby bird hidden in his pocket, they used real waxworms. However, the animal control inspector on set wouldn’t let them feed the bird a living one. So, the crew had to wait around and watch the buckets of waxworms until one died.
40.
And finally, The blue milk that Mark Hamill drank in Star Wars: A New Hope was “warm, oily, [and] sickly-sweet.” On Twitter, he described it as “gag-inducing.” Comparing the movie milk to the version sold in Disney Parks, he said, “This frosty non-dairy drink tasted like a yummy fruit smoothie.”
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