That Grotesque Body Horror Sequence At The End Of Men Was Hilarious Behind The Scenes
It's been close to two years since Alex Garland's creepy A24 horror flick "Men" came out, and we've pretty much never stopped thinking about its deeply effed-up ending. Apparently we're not the only ones: in the most recent issue of Total Film magazine, star Jessie Buckley reminisced about shooting the film's bizarre climax scene — in which the titular men appear via a grotesque and utterly unexpected self-birth sequence.
Calling the final version of Rory Kinnear's character a "head-f**k of a beast," Total Film asked Buckley about the experience of sharing space with the monstrous entity. The actress was quick to demystify the man behind the men, explaining that Kinnear was a great co-star who endured a lot of nasty prep to get into his characters' final form. "Rory Kinnear — I mean, I love that man with all my heart," Buckley explained. "It was basically just the two of us for the whole shoot, because he was every man." She calls Kinnear "one of the funniest f***ers I've ever worked with," and says she struggled to keep a straight face. If you're brave enough to rewatch the movie, Buckley says you can spot a lot of moments where "I've had to turn away because I've just laughed."
Kinnear's good humor apparently extended to the makeup chair, where he had to be fitted with prosthetics for the sequence in which his character give birth to multiple versions of himself. "Getting any kind of prosthetic on ever, it's a big old feat of eight hours sitting in a chair. He was covered, and there'd be different layers of gunk that had to be put on him," Buckley explained, noting that the scene was filmed as a night shoot during the last week of filming.
Rory Kinnear accidentally started a conversation with a sheep
The viscera coating Kinnear's character(s) came at least in part from smushed fruit, though it sounds like he and Buckley were more focused on the bewildering predicament they'd found themselves in than the particulars of the ingredient list. "He'd be in his little tighty-whitey shorts having smashed banana and blood poured on him," Buckley recalled. "You'd just look at him and go, 'Bad life choices.' We both knew, 'This is so far out. We're just going to have to commit.'"
In a previous interview with IndieWire, Garland praised Kinnear for being "brave and straightforward and not bulls**tty about" filming the final scenes. "Some actors, in a way, would have very understandably made those two weeks of shooting really, really difficult, but he was so game," he explained, adding:
"If you can imagine, you're doing all that s**t in -2 [degrees Celsius], and you're also crawling out of a prosthetic that has no relationship with anything real. It looks silly. It looks totally ridiculous. He put a lot of trust in everybody around him. I felt very grateful to him, really, and very admiring."
The silliness was apparently exacerbated by the presence of an animal that wanted to get in on the fun. "Rory came in, and fell to his knees, and let the first bellow out — or moo, or whatever," Buckley told Total Film. "It was about one o'clock at night, and he let the first labor pain out, and in the adjoining field, a sheep bellowed back to him," the actress said with a laugh. "The sheep was like, 'Mehrrrrrrrrr!'"
It's nice that someone can laugh about the freaky man-monster, because I'm still just trying to get it out of my head.