4

Life Must Be A Nightmare For Actors Who Have To Wear Elaborate Makeup, Right?

It always seemed so cool as a kid, wearing all that complicated makeup and costuming. It must be a childhood dream come true for any actor who gets the chance to play a monster or an alien in a movie, in what might be the most expensive form of make-believe possible.

And then I grew up and realized that sitting around waiting for a shot to get set up while sweating your nipples off and unable to scratch your nose without ruining the seven hours of makeup stuck to your head sounds like something that should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention. What's incredible is that a single Google search immediately fires up dozens and dozens of pages of celebrities describing their makeup horror stories in the same way that I would describe being trapped at the bottom of a well.

John Rhys Davies doesn't have as fond a memory of working on the Lord Of The Rings movies as the rest of the Fellowship. While the others had to wear, at most, a pair of awkward floppy prosthetic feet or fake pointy ears, Davies was in a full facial prosthetic held on with glue he was allergic to. Those movies took around three years to shoot, and Davies was in pain every single day he was on set. Gimli might have been a grumpy character, but the man who played him hated living in Middle-earth more than any crotchety dwarf ever could.

In Legend, Tim Curry played the Lord of Darkness, ostensibly the devil, showcasing one of the most impressive monster makeup effects in movie history. But as you'd suspect after a quick look at him, the huge fiberglass horns on his head messed up his neck and back. One night, while performing his ritual of soaking in a bath for an hour to loosen the prosthetic glue, Curry lost his patience and started ripping off the prosthetics, taking chunks of his own skin with it.

Universal Pictures
A small price to pay for a highly fuckable devil.

Producers brought in a CIA torture expert to teach Jim Carrey techniques on how to endure the hell of his eight-and-a-half-hour transformation into the Grinch. As if seeing the Grinch in real life wasn't terrifying enough, imagine the Grinch chain-smoking and punching his own legs while demanding that people randomly hit him across the head. He described the makeup application as "being buried alive every day."

3

Male Actors Must Be Popping Boners All Over During Sex Scenes, Right?

On one hand, I realize that many porn actors have reached down deep inside of themselves and found the will to maintain erections while a bunch of bored crew members look on. I can respect that. But for every non-porn kind of actor, it would seem like an audience would be a boner deterrent. It's like pee shyness taken to its most nightmarish extreme. And that's good, right? Sex scene or not, this is neither the time nor the place for your raging hard-on to make an appearance. On the other hand, erections can be uncontrollable bodily reactions that can only be combated by running away while apologizing profusely to everyone in sight.

That's pretty much what Henry Cavill did on the set of The Tudors when he got hard during a sex scene. "It's not great when you're in a professional acting environment and somebody gets a boner, is it?" Acting is one of the only professions on Earth in which a boner is not welcomed but is understood, given a specific set of circumstances -- that being two people intentionally giving each other blue balls.

While I'd imagine it's a painfully awkward experience for most actors, there is one performer I came across in my research who could probably make the full transition into porn if he wasn't also one of the people whose name continuously came up in my research for actors with bad breath. Hugh Grant once said, "I've always enjoyed sex scenes, though you're not really supposed to. The classic answer is, 'Oh, it's not sexy at all because there are so many technicians standing around.' But I've always found them extremely arousing." A sound guy in cargo shorts and a Chicago Cubs hat looming over Grant with a ten-foot pole as he pretend-plows an actress who'd rather be anywhere else on the face of the Earth than in that room in that moment really gets his balls swelled with anticipation.

2

Where Did That Old-Timey Movie Voice Come From, And Why Did It Die?

The Transatlantic accent is that voice we all recognize as a part of our pop culture subconscious, even if we've never seen a movie from the time period it's from. It's the voice basically everyone used in every movie from the 1930s, 1940s, and even into the 1950s. It was somehow vaguely British AND vaguely American, combining elements of both to create an accent that sounded like nobody on Earth. R's were dropped almost entirely, turning "darling" into "dawling." T's, especially if they were at the end of a word, were given waaay too much emphasis at the expense of all the letters that came before them, turning "water" into "woah-tah."

It was the only way actors spoke -- and then it vanished, like an entire species wiped out in an instant by an asteroid. It pops up every now and again, but only as a reference to days gone by, like the voice Elizabeth Banks used in the Hunger Games movies, or in Mark Hamill's version of the Joker. But where did this phenomenon come from, and why is it that one day, we woke up and it was gone, stealing our money and watch when it absconded into the night?

The Transatlantic accent is fake. It's like when your friend comes back from a couple of weeks in England sounding like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. It was a cornerstone of Edith Skinner's Speak With Distinction, a textbook teaching aspiring actors how to speak clearly on stage. And it didn't just live on the screen; it was encountered in real life, though not nearly as often as every other American accent. It was taught to kids throughout the Northeastern United States as an international version of English, so that they could better sound like an inbred aristocratic snob every time they asked "fathah" if they could take the Rolls-Royce for a spin around the slums that evening.

Still, the accent's exact origins aren't entirely known. One theory suggests it was developed to better fit the tinny tones of old radios, which couldn't produce bass without blowing out their speakers. While there's no one person or story to point to for its origin, we can point to one group of people for popularizing it: America's aristocratic elite. The accent gained prominence in a time when America was prosperous and the influence of the very rich held sway. That changed after World War II.

1

It's Hard To Watch A Movie During Which Someone Died On Set Without Wondering What Scene It Happened In

It's impossible. I need to know. I need to know the scene, the way it happened. Then I try to figure out if I'm watching the actor or a body double. Is it the actor just a few days before they died, or are they already dead and their stand-in is wearing the clothes of a dead person? It's terrible, and I just can't stop thinking about it.

This kind of "fun" morbidity has the same effect on me as looking at old people with cheeks so droopy that it gives them basset hound eyes -- it's too repellent to ponder for too long without falling into a depression. The obsessive creep factor has led to the creation of a list of movies I can't ever watch again, which is probably for the best, since most are dogshit anyway.

The Crow is a movie I watched, I'll say, ten times before learning its star was killed during filming in a freakish gun accident. My 11th and final viewing was spent examining each frame like Kevin Costner looking over the Zapruder Film for evidence of a second shooter in JFK. Turns out the tragic mid-scene death of an actor during the production of a film was not included in the final cut. Seems like a real lost opportunity.

The Twilight Zone movie is probably the most famous example of the bunch. Actor Vic Morrow and two child actors were famously killed during a horrific accident, which was made all the more terrible when it was discovered that director John Landis ran what might be one of the most dangerous, most morally bankrupt movie sets ever.

But none of them trigger my morbid fascination with on-set death quite as thoroughly as The Adventures Of Milo And Otis, the live-action kids movie about a dog and a cat who get into a series of scrapes and have to find their way back home. It's was probably really cute when you were four, but it gets remarkably less cute when you hear that pesky, unproven (but extremely prevalent) rumor that up to 30 Milos and Otises were killed during production, and one kitten may have had its paw purposefully broken for one shot, and oh my god, if that's true, the movie is a cinematic pet cemetery. The rumors were never proven, so we may never know for sure just how many animals may or may not have been killed to make 1986's 14th most forgettable movie.

But here's one unsettling bit of trivia to leave you with: You know how movies with animals in them will say "No animals were harmed during the making of this film?" The Adventures Of Milo And Otis has that, but its wording is a little ... off. It says: "The animals used were filmed under strict supervision with the utmost care for their safety and well-being."

I'm not saying they're lying. What I'm saying is, if you asked me if I killed 30 dogs and cats to make a shitty kids movie and I didn't want you to know, I think I'd say something along the lines of "Well, we did try our best." And then I'd run as fast as I possibly could away from you. Like, I-just-popped-a-boner-on-set fast.

Luis has been trapped in a full-body prosthetic suit for several hours with no hope of escape. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.

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