Filming his new movie, Little Brother, with John Cena was fun, but it came at a cost for actor Eric André, who had to film the most NSFW scene in the “swamp a** heat” of the summer.
In the scene, Rudd (Cena) tells his long-lost little brother, Marcus (André), to stay in his expensive sports car while he films his reality show. Naturally, Marcus has to use the restroom, but he doesn’t want to disappoint Rudd. As you’d imagine, this leads to him trying to relieve himself without getting out of the car, and it goes as well as it could have.
André remembers the day well, as he recalled it to ClutchPoints during the Little Brother junket. He’s no stranger to physical comedy, coming from Adult Swim, but the weather conditions made it a miserable time.
“We shot on the hottest days of the summer, and I will say, there’s those [days]—you’re an East Coast guy—in Jersey, in New York, in Philly, where it’s so hot you feel like your brain is swelling against your head,” he explained. “That was one of those days.
“So I had to do a tremendous amount of physical comedy, and [I come] from [doing] Adult Swim for a decade, where you only have two takes of everything, and you have to film things very quickly ’cause you don’t have time, you don’t have money. When you’re on a movie set, you have a bit more money than a 15-minute Adult Swim show, so you have to shoot every angle, shoot a ton of coverage, make it feel cinematic, and give it its production value,” André continued.
Having the budget is nice, but it resulted in a “quite challenging day” out in, as his friend phrased it, “devil’s a*shole hot.” They got the scene, but at what cost?
“I think I lost my mind at the end of that day doing all that physical comedy over and over and over and over and over again in that swamp-a*s late-July New Jersey heat,” he acknowledged.
Little Brother director Matt Spicer gave his account of filming Eric André’s NSFW scene
It doesn’t sound like André was exaggerating about his experience. Matt Spicer recalled filming the scene, which was one of the first they shot. He thought getting one of the most difficult scenes out of the way would make the rest a breeze.
“He’s right — I think it was one of the hottest summers on record that week,” Spicer recalled. “That whole sequence took a few days to shoot, so we were outside in the heat. I think it was our second week of shooting, so we were still getting up and running.
“I was like, ‘I wanna do something really hard upfront so that we can push ourselves,'” he added. “That was one of the most complicated sequences in the film.”
The difficulties came with the mix of stunt work and VFX. As Spicer explained, it took a couple of days to get all of the right angles.
“There [were] a lot of moving parts,” Spicer explained. “I think all the stuff in the car was one day. Then all the stuff out of the car was another. And then all the stuff in the house looking outside at the car was another, and then you stitch it all together in post[-production].”
Pushing Netflix past its ‘line of acceptability’
A lot went into the scene behind closed doors, too. Spicer recalled meetings about how far they could push the envelope, especially when it came to Netflix’s potential censorship.
“My hope is, when you watch the movie, it feels seamless,” he said. “But it was one of those things — we had a lot of meetings, a lot of things like, ‘How do we break this down? What can we show of Eric? What can we not show?'”
Ultimately, they figured out the balance Netflix was willing to accept. Spicer thinks they pushed Netflix “a little bit out of their comfort zone,” which was a “victory” for the director. He also claimed to hear that the studio executives who watched the dailies gave the scenes “big laughs.”
Perhaps André doesn’t feel this way, but Spicer loves the finished product. It’s the one he’s most excited to see viewers’ reactions to.
“It’s one of my favorite sequences in the movie and one of the ones I’m most proud of,” he raved. “Hopefully, that’s [the] most surprising [scene] to people watching it for the first time.”
Little Brother will be available to stream on Netflix on June 26.
The post Exclusive: Eric André recalls filming NSFW Little Brother scene in the hottest ‘swamp a** heat’ appeared first on ClutchPoints.
