Steve Carell Nearly Lost A Body Part Shooting The 40-Year-Old Virgin

"The 40-Year-Old Virgin" is a 2005 comedy classic about Andy (Steve Carell), a 40-year-old electronics salesman who has never had sex with another person. While it's probably not the kind of movie that you could get made today and some of its jokes have aged like milk, at its heart, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" is kind of sweet and really, really funny. Carell is the warm, gooey center of the movie, as Andy is an adorable nerd who just hasn't gotten laid because of circumstance and not because he's some kind of unlovable troll. He also has incredible chemistry with Catherine Keener, who plays his love interest Trish. While Carell is great in most things, he's really stellar in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," but there was one scene that almost took too much out of him. In fact, it almost took a bit of flesh, as Carell nearly lost a nipple while filming the movie's funniest scene.

Plenty of actors practice some form of Method acting, where they do certain things for real or take on qualities of their character to make their performance more authentic, but for the waxing scene in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," Carell and director Judd Apatow decided to wax Carell's rather furry chest for real, on camera. The results are hilarious, with Carell screaming truly unusual exclamations of pain (with "Kelly Clarkson!" being my favorite), but according to Apatow, Carell was in some very real pain.

In a 20th anniversary retrospective interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Apatow revealed that it was Carell's idea to wax him for real. As such, he and the rest of the film's crew shot the scene "like a documentary," with five different cameras going to ensure they got full coverage of the action. However, they also needed a waxer who could act, which led to some complications. As Apatow recalled:

"We wanted the waxer to be someone who was an actress and also a professional waxer. Miki Mia claimed to have been a waxer, but I think maybe she had only done it once because she clearly didn't know how to do it, and we almost ripped his nipples off during the shoot."

Look, actors have had to do some pretty wretched things for science-fiction movies and horror movies over the years, but almost having your nipple ripped off with a chunk of wax and paper for a sex comedy is some serious dedication. Indeed, you can see quite a bit of blood welling up on Carell's chest from his individual pores during this scene. I've had my eyebrows waxed, and while they're not nearly as voluminous as Carell's chest curls, there was also absolutely no blood and a lot less redness. Waxing is going to hurt, but Carell's experience seemed especially rough.

In the scene, Andy is getting his chest waxed in case he actually ends up hooking up with someone, and instead of looking svelte and hairless, he ends up with patches of angry, naked skin and large swathes of thick chest hair. It kind of looks like he's a hairy Jack-o'-lantern, and it's clear that at least one of his nipples is very raw. He yells about the whole experience and storms out, and it's not hard to imagine some of that frustration was Carell realizing that he had made a mistake in getting waxed for real. Heck, maybe he was regretting coming up with the basis of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" at all. 

In the end, everything worked out, and Carell's nipples survived, leaving us with one of the most gonzo scenes in sex comedy history. It's like a "Jackass" stunt but with significantly better lighting, with Carell's ad-libbing and his co-stars cracking up for real making it all the funnier. Sometimes you have to suffer for your art, after all.