A lot can go wrong when you put actors in front of a camera. Maybe your lead will suffer some painful accident while filming. Maybe it feels like the entire movie production is cursed. Or maybe an actor will just suddenly break away from the scene, run to the nearest garbage bin, and vomit.
Granted, an upset stomach is not the worst thing in the world, and everyone should be able to resume filming before long. Still, the episode is sure to gross everyone who’s there to see it. And whether you’re filming a blockbuster like Armageddon or a prestige drama like Masters of Sex, the story stands as a firm reminder that the entertainment business isn’t always so glamorous.
7
‘Madame Web’ (2024)
The most physically challenging part of shooting Madame Web was evidently not the stunt driving, the stunt fighting, or the stunt involving a giant water tank. It was dealing with the Boston heat. Overheating made Sydney Sweeney throw up while making Madame Web, briefly halting filming.
The real problem was the wig Sydney Sweeney wore to portray her character, Julia Cornwall. Julia is a redhead, Sweeney is not, and rather than breaking out the hair dye, the production opted for a heavy strawberry blonde wig. Wearing that on one of the hottest days of summer resulted in what we call heat exhaustion or heatstroke. Costars Celeste O’Connor and Isabela Merced told Cosmopolitan that they now demanded a break in the shoot despite Sweeney’s insistence that she was ready to get right back up.
You might assume that if anything causes actresses to overheat during these superhero movies, it would be those tight costumes, but it seems that’s not the case. And anyway, it turned out that the much publicized costumes worn by the many Spider-Women in Madame Web only appeared in the movie for a few seconds of flash-forwards.
6
‘Masters of Sex’ (2013)
We won’t be spoiling anything for you by telling you the two leads on Showtime’s Masters of Sex end up having sex. You could guess that for yourself as soon as you hear it’s a Showtime drama starring a man and a woman (Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan as sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson), and that’s before you even learn Master of Sex’s name or premise. Plus, the opening episode ends with Sheen’s character telling Caplan’s that they should have sex as soon as possible, for science, boldly defying the way will-they-or-won’t-they romances usually go.
The first time the actors shot a love scene, however, did not go quite as planned. The two stripped and made physical contact, and then when the scene ended, Sheen immediately went to a trash bin and threw up. It was, Caplan explained on an episode of Conan, among the least desirable responses you expect from someone who has just seen you naked.
Rather than reacting to her or to the scene, it turned out that Michael Sheen was suffering from food poisoning. In the years since that 2013 shoot, productions have adopted intimacy coordinators for sex scenes. Coordinators ask actors how they feel during shoots, and we imagine that now includes asking them how comfortable their intestines feel.
This Bold Drama Series Explores One of the Most Taboo Subjects in U.S. History
The students become the Masters.
5
‘Adrift’ (2018)
The 2018 movie Adrift recounts the real-life story of sailor Tami Oldham, whose yacht capsized during a Pacific hurricane. That largely put the boat out of commission, but she went on sailing it anyway for the next 41 days, treating it as a raft till she made it back to Hawaii.
Adrift stars Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin, and though they used plenty of CGI to create giant waves, they really did shoot this survival story on the open ocean. They sailed out for two hours then filmed for 12 hours, and the production did not take any steps to prevent everyone involved from suffering from seasickness. Woodley threw up overboard. Claflin threw up overboard. The sound guy threw up overboard. The makeup woman threw up overboard.
The only people there who avoided throwing up, Woodley said on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, were director Baltasar Kormákur and cinematographer Robert Richardson. There’s an old folk remedy for seasickness, which says you should stare at the horizon till your nausea goes away. Staring at a shoot with an artistic eye might have the same effect.
4
‘Apollo 13’ (1995)
Apollo 13, unlike Adrift, very much did take steps to prevent everyone from getting sick. The production shot actors in actual low-gravity conditions by filming in a military aircraft that dove for 25 seconds at a time, creating weightlessness. This experience is so likely to induce sickness in the untrained passenger that the plane is nicknamed “the vomit comet.” They had to prepare, or disaster was inevitable.
So, the Apollo 13 cast and crew trained in advance of the shoot. They took medications, not mild anti-nausea remedies but a cocktail of Scopolamine and Dexedrine. This hit of amphetamines left director Ron Howard quite high when they canceled one shoot and the drugs remained in his system.
All this prep successfully kept Howard from throwing up, and it did the same for actors like Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon. It did not work on everyone. After one foreboding lunch of Mexican chili, a cameraman succumbed to motion sickness and let loose vomit into the aircraft’s cabin. The vomit landed all over Kevin Bacon, as Bacon later told Entertainment Weekly. First, however, came a few surreal seconds in which it hung in midair. Bacon could do nothing but float as well and await the inevitable collision.
3
‘Armageddon’ (1998)
You might guess that Armageddon produced some aircraft-related motion sickness, much like Apollo 13 did. You would be mistaken. The cast and crew didn’t use any special planes to simulate zero-gravity but stuck to such classic techniques as wires and harnesses. Plus, as the cast revealed on Armageddon’s famously entertaining DVD commentary track, director Michael Bay would tell actors to simply, “Act weightless.”
None of that saved star Ben Affleck from vomiting between takes. The culprit here wasn’t motion sickness, since no one experienced any motion of note, but rather another unfortunate case of food poisoning.
The nausea kicked in during the filming of one especially pivotal scene: the emotional goodbye between Affleck’s character and Bruce Willis. As Affleck explained to FOX 32, the pain of his stomach lurching contributed to how well he performed the scene. Ben Affleck would later call Armageddon his best performance — or at least he’d joke that his best performance was the movie’s DVD commentary track.
2
‘The African Queen’ (1951)
The African Queen, the 1951 classic starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, filmed for seven weeks in the Belgian Congo. As a result, shooting The African Queen led to some pretty crazy experiences. A hippo lifted up their boat. Parasites burrowed into Bogart’s toes. At one point, Lauren Bacall (there to visit husband Humphrey Bogart, though she wasn’t acting in the movie) laid her feet on a carpet, which then moved out from her across the room, because it was being lifted by an army of ants.
These adventures went on to inspire Disney’s Jungle Cruise (inspired both the ride and the eventual movie). The worst part of the shoot, however, was when the cast and crew of The African Queen got dysentery. Dysentery leads to a lot of vomiting, and that’s actually one of its less painful symptoms. Bloody diarrhea is a more excruciating one. A long line often formed outside the shoot’s shared latrine, a line that dispersed in terror one day when someone ran out of there, having caught sight of a black mamba.
Hepburn suffered from this dysentery, along with so many others on set, and she had to run to a bucket between takes. Bogart and director John Huston managed to avoid getting sick. They credited drinking less water than the others, because as Time reported, the two of them generally stuck to Scotch.
1
‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ (1974)
The cast from 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre threw up from disgust while filming — and if that were all we told you, this might sound like an urban legend invented to promote the movie. But the actors didn’t throw up from horror over how scary the movie was. The truth is grosser than that.
Director Tobe Hooper shot the movie in a farmhouse, which they decorated with animal remains to create a festive slaughterhouse theme. To the viewer, the sight of eight cattle carcasses and immeasurable amounts of blood might be quite disturbing. To the cast, the experience was far worse. They had to deal with the stench of animal flesh decomposing under 115-degree heat for five weeks. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre cast couldn’t bear the smell of the decay, and as Texas Monthly reported, they kept vomiting out the farmhouse’s window.
The original movie was followed by a bewildering series of follow-ups in the Texas Chainsaw series, none of which came anywhere near the original’s critical reception. These include sequels, reboots, and belated sequels that create new timelines. Currently, a new Texas Chainsaw movie and TV series are both in development. Hollywood is all about regurgitation.
Credit: Source link