Charlie Hunnam has faced some wild scenes on screen, but ‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story‘ gave him a whole new challenge.
The actor had to spend a day covered “head to toe” in fake vomit and diarrhea while filming one very gross scene with Rebecca Hall. Even worse, Hunnam is a germaphobe, so he was already dreading the shoot before it even began.
Charlie Hunnam Dreaded The Gross ‘Monster’ Scene
Ryan Murphy’s shows are known for shocking viewers, and ‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story‘ is no different. Near the end of episode 2, Andrew and Abby become extremely sick after eating spoiled oysters.
They start projectile vomiting and even soil their underwear in the dining room. But the oysters did not go bad by accident. Lizzie and maid Bridget Sullivan purposely served the out-of-season oysters because they hoped to poison Andrew and Abby to death.
Hunnam knew filming the moment would not be fun. He admitted he was “dreading” it. “It seemed like it was gonna require being very, very uncomfortable and, you know, I’m kind of a germaphobe. So even if it’s fake vomit, being covered head to toe in vomit and diarrhea for the day did not seem like a particularly enjoyable experience. And indeed it wasn’t.”
Related: ‘Monster’ Season 4: The Chilling True Story Of Lizzie Borden
Max Winkler Wanted The Vomiting To Be Totally Over The Top
Winkler had a very specific idea for the scene. He wanted the vomiting to look huge and almost like a performance. “I always knew that I wanted the experience to feel kind of like when you go to the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, and you see the fountains. I wanted there to be an Andrea Bocelli symphonic experience with it,” Winkler says. “And so I would say that’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my career was coordinate that.”
The director spent hours online researching how other movies created fake vomiting scenes. He especially looked at Triangle of Sadness, which he called “the best movie that ever did it.” “I researched as much as I could of that online and on YouTube without ever getting to speak to anybody who worked on it to see how you can make it feel like vomiting,” he says, calling it “such a violent, horrible experience.”
The crew also had to test the scene several times before filming the final version. “We do everything once as a dry run without the vomit. So everybody’s faking it,” he explains. “Then we do tubes, which we have to do many tests and figure out what’s the distance, what’s too crazy, what’s just crazy enough, what’s too small. Then we start with them putting stuff in their mouth and just doing that version of it.”
In case you missed it: Charlie Hunnam Explains Why His ‘Monster’ Voice Sounds Nothing Like Ed Gein After Brutal Reviews
Rebecca Hall Ended Up Laughing Through It
Another big problem for Winkler was making sure Hall did not actually throw up. The actress admitted she has a very strong reaction to seeing people vomit. “I’m not good with icky stuff, and I’m really not good with vomiting,” the actress admits. “I have like a hair-trigger empathetic response, and I will immediately start [vomiting].” Before filming, she even asked, “What’s it gonna be like? How are we doing it? Because there’s a chance that I might vomit and I don’t wanna do that.”
But things changed once Hall saw Hunnam wearing the vomit rig. Instead of feeling sick, she found the whole thing hilarious. “It was so funny and preposterous, and nothing was remotely like real vomiting, actually,” she confesses. “It turned out that my biggest challenge was maintaining a straight face when the camera was on me, because I don’t think I’ve ever laughed more.” The fake vomit still ruined one thing for her, though. “I never wanna, as long as I live, see a bowl of tomato soup ever, ever, ever again,” she adds. “I really liked grilled cheese and tomato soup, but it is over for me now forever.”
Beatty had a much easier job and called filming the scene “so much fun.” She did not have to wear any of the vomit equipment and instead got to watch Hunnam and Hall deal with it. “I was so excited to see how we were gonna do that,” she says. “Even the technical aspect of it, I was really curious about. I was really lucky I got to just sit at the table while Rebecca and Charlie had vomit rigs on.”
So, while the scene looks absolutely disgusting on screen, making it was a very different story. Hunnam had to face his germaphobe nightmare, Hall struggled not to laugh, and Beatty got the best seat in the house without getting covered in anything.
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