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Topics: Film and TV, Florence Pugh, Horror, US News, Sex and Relationships
Liv Bridge
Topics: Film and TV, Florence Pugh, Horror, US News, Sex and Relationships
An actor has lifted the lid on how he mentally processed a graphic orgy scene in a controversial horror.
Midsommar star Jack Reynor has broken his silence on how the cast reacted after watching Ari Aster's folk horror movie for the first time when it hit the big screen in 2019.
While he said his co-stars were left lost for words, sitting in stony silence after watching it together, the 33-year-old Irish actor had a pretty different reaction to when filming wrapped up and he boxed off his job after filming a giant orgy scene.
In the movie, Reynor and Florence Pugh bring to life Dani and Christian, an American couple who, to cut a long story short, end up drawn into a violent cult in rural Sweden.
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It's jam-packed with plenty of full-frontal nudity and on THAT sexually charged scene in particular, Reynor admits it was 'extremely awkward and uncomfortable'.
When asked about his experience seeing the movie for the first time, he described it as "Tough! f***ing tough!" to Entertainment Weekly.
"We watched it as a cast together in New York. We all laughed through the first two-thirds of the film, at all that gallows humor, and then for the final third of the film, all of us were silent. When the credits rolled, there was no 'High-five! You did an amazing job! Oh my God, you're so good in the film!' It was just silence. All of us sat there with our heads in our hands.
"It was a good 10 minutes of not talking."
The Transformers star then revealed how he processed the whole ordeal immediately after filming, adding: "I basically went from [the set] to the airport and I got f***ing smashed.
"I said, ‘Send me on two flights home, don’t send me direct, I want to transfer, because I’m going to get even more f***ing hammered.'”
However, despite his apparent visceral reaction to the movie's ending, Reynor said he believes it all stands for something 'worth doing'.
He said: "It's a hard one to digest, and there's a lot unpack in it. But that's the kind of s*** that it's worth doing.
"Last time I got that feeling watching a film was when I watched In the Realm of the Senses, the Nagisa Oshima [film]. That f***ed me up too. So it was the same kind of feeling—just heaviness. But you're watching something that has been meticulously designed to create that feeling in you."
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, the star also commented that a 'big reason' he wanted to be involved in the film was to portray a different kind of character.
"I was fascinated by this archetypal alpha male character being stripped of absolutely everything over the course of the film — including his community of friends who uphold his structure as an archetypal alpha male and ultimately, his own personality."
Reynor continued: "He suffers this very humiliating and exposing fate, and that’s something that, as a cinephile, I’ve really only ever seen that happening to female characters in the horror genre, particularly that level of exposure, especially in a sexual context.
"So, it was an opportunity to be part of something that flipped that on its head, and I really wanted to engage with the experience of it by advocating for as much full-frontal nudity as possible."
As for pies and pastries though, Reynor said he'll never be able to look at a Cornish pasty 'the same way again'. If you know, you know...