“None Of Us Were Happy”: 49 Unpleasant BTS Stories From Movie And TV Show Sets

Director Roman Polanski was an absolute pain for actress Faye Dunaway to work with on the set of Chinatown—he wouldn’t even let her go to the bathroom in between takes. As a result, out of sheer desperation, Dunaway had to pee in a cup. Furious at the director’s actions, she hurled the cup of pee in his face.

Decades later, Cary Elwes still recalls the gigantic fart that his co-star in The Princess Bride, André the Giant, let out on set while filming the castle storming scene. Elwes told Live with Kelly and Ryan, "André goes, 'I guess not very long'... and he lets out the most monumental fart. I mean, no, for real, like, insane, like, deafening. We all still have tinnitus in one ear. The whole plywood set was shaking, and the sound guy lifted his headphones off his ears and like was [shaking his head]. And it went on for—somebody timed it! It was 16 seconds!"

Zac Efron actually got peed on by Nicole Kidman when filming the jellyfish scene in The Paperboy. Lee Daniels, the director, told Vulture, "We just went for it and never thought twice about it, because it made sense for the film. It was what it was. I think that I became more nervous about it in the edit room, and I thought, I'm not actually going to show this, right? Is it vulgar? And I called Nicole and said, 'I don't know,' and she said, 'Lee, you made me pee on Zac Efron. If you don't put it in the movie, you need to man up.' And I was like, 'All right, I ain't gonna pu**y out! Okay.'"

In the notorious water tank escape scene in Now You See Me, Isla Fisher was trapped underwater during the three-minute segment when she couldn’t get her release chain out of her outfit. What everyone thought was just great acting was her genuinely drowning. "I was actually drowning," she remarked to Chelsea Handler on Chelsea Lately. "Everyone thought I was acting fabulously. ... no one realized I was actually struggling."

In the skin-crawling bee scene in Candyman, actor Tony Todd had live bees put in his mouth during filming. Having suffered at least 20 stings as a result, Todd revealed to the Guardian, "I negotiated a bonus of $1,000 for every sting during the bee scene. And I got stung 23 times. Everything that's worth making has to involve some sort of pain. Once I realized it was an important part of who Candyman was, I embraced it. It was like putting on a beautiful coat.”

When filming the famous breakfast spaghetti scene in Elf, Will Ferrell, who played Buddy, puked the first time he tried the pasta-candy mash-up. Screen Rant revealed he had to shoot the scene twice and developed a migraine due to all the sugar he ate.

When filming the scene in Poltergeist, where her character, Diane, falls into an excavated pool, Actress JoBeth Williams thought she was swimming with a bunch of fake skeletons. She discovered that they were actually real skeletons years later. She admitted to Vanity Fair, "I always assumed that the skeletons were made by the prop department. A few years later, I ran into one of the special effects guys, and I said, 'You guys making all those skeletons, that must have been really amazing.' He said, 'Oh, we didn't make them, those were real.' I said, 'What?' He said, 'Yeah, they were real skeletons…”

The 1960s film Psycho was the first to violate the Hays Code, according to the Toronto Star. It went against the censorship guidelines for films by being the first to portray a flushing toilet onscreen.

In an unusual twist of fate, Matt LeBlanc swallowed some trifle, which was actually whipped cream and a couple of bananas, that David Schwimmer had spat out while filming a take of the Friends episode "The One Where Ross Got High.” LeBlanc said on The Graham Norton Show, "There was too much on his plate. So he starts to eat it all, and he starts laughing, and we cut. We're cutting, and he spits it back on his plate. I'm sitting right next to him, and I'm looking the other way. I didn't see him spit it back on his plate. So, I take his plate...and I scrape some on my plate... We go again, and now I'm eating it. We finish the take. No one says anything to me."

In a 2018 interview with Esquire, English actor Charles Dance, who portrayed Tywin Lannister on Game of Thrones, spoke about his character’s infamous deer skinning scene. He said, “I learned how to skin a deer. I skinned a deer quite well actually. They came to me one day and said 'Charles, are you a vegetarian?' I said, 'No, of course not.' So they got this butcher chap to show me how to skin a whole deer and then I did it, and I did it well... I think. I was hoping for a nice haunch of venison from it, but they didn't even let me keep a hoof!”

The Euphoria Season 2 hot tub scene, where Cassie appeared to be projectile vomiting all over the place, was a combination of CGI and practical effects. Sydney Sweeney, who plays Cassie in the show, revealed to Hot Ones, "They had to get a pump, and they had this pipe that they just taped and hid on my body. And then they CGI'd it out up my neck, and then there was a horse bit that I had to put in my mouth. So during that scene, they’re filling my mouth with throw up. And then I opened my mouth, and it just started shooting out my mouth.” It was the most disgusting thing I ever experienced."

For the final family dinner scene in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, directors set the table with actual rotting animal carcasses. Shooting went on for 26 hours in sweltering heat, with many on set having to flee for air in between takes. Makeup artist, Dorothy Pearl, was responsible for injecting formaldehyde into the food to slow down the rotting process. To Telegraph, Pearl revealed, "That meat was old, it was rotten, it was putrid, it was terrible. But I believe that the dire circumstances added to the film. If we’d been comfy, if everybody had their own trailer, I'm not so sure you'd feel the horror in quite the way you do. None of us were happy. We were miserable."

We all recall the notorious dinner table scene in Django Unchained where Calvin J. Candie, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, goes into a fit of rage and smashes a glass, which causes his hand to start bleeding everywhere. What we didn’t know was that all that bleeding was genuine. DiCaprio told The Hollywood Reporter, "Maybe they thought it was done with special effects. I wanted to keep going. It was more interesting to watch [director Quentin Tarantino's and co-star Jamie Foxx's] reaction off-camera than to look at my hand. We did it bloodied and bandaged for the rest of the movie. I'm glad Quentin kept it in."

In the CPR scene in The Wolf of Wall Street, where Jordan saves Donnie from choking to death, lube was used to get the projectile of ham from Jonah Hill’s mouth to stick to Leonardo DiCaprio’s face. DiCaprio revealed on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, "We were doing this CPR sequence, and, you know, the big challenge that day, we had to do 70 takes because they couldn't get this ham to stick on my face. And they had to put K-Y Jelly, and there's literally a guy there behind this giant window with a plastic spoon just flicking ham on my face all day long as I'm doing this insane sequence."

When filming Vampire's Kiss, Nicolas Cage said to director Robert Bierman, "The thing I hate most in the world are cockroaches. They are my Room 101… So let me eat a cockroach." Bierman happily obliged, and Cage was given a cockroach to crunch onscreen. Bierman informed the Ringer, "He wanted to eat the most frightening thing for him." Cage remarked, "I really [wanted] to do something that would shock the audience, something you would never forget."
To make sure Cage wouldn’t fall ill, a doctor was consulted at the request of the producer Barbara Zitwer. The doctor said, "No. But have him drink some whiskey right after." So Cage, who shot the scene in two takes, actually swallowed the two cockroaches and rinsed his mouth out with 100-proof vodka after. Barry Shils, the co-producer, fibbed to an animal rights group when he told them no cockroaches were harmed during filming.

One simply cannot mention chocolate cake without thinking of the famous cake scene involving Bruce Bogtrotter in Matilda. Jim Karz, the actor who portrayed Bruce told Newsweek, "There were a ton of cakes. They had a factory, like, pumping out the cakes… I don't know how much I ate. It was definitely a lot." The film's cinematographer, Stefan Czapsky added, "What was ironic about it was, the actor who played Bruce? He didn't like chocolate cake. They had a spit bucket for him. It worked for the scene because it was kind of like a child torture scene — to force him to eat chocolate cake."

The horse heart Daenerys, played by Emilia Clarke, had to eat in the first season of the show was actually a “gummy bear” heart, made out of solidified jam. During filming, she had to eat 28 portions of what she said tasted like “bleach and raw pasta.” Clarke told The Mirror, "It was very helpful to be given something so truly disgusting to eat, so there wasn’t much acting required..." Due to being drenched in gallons of sticky fake blood, Clarke was constantly sticking to things during filming. When on Jimmy Kimmel Live, she stated, "I was kind of covered head to toe in the fake blood. And I'm kind of continually sticking myself, to myself or to other things."

Thanks to sushi, the thought of eating raw fish doesn’t usually repulse people. However, in Batman Returns, Danny DeVito had to eat a raw bluefish and was particularly grossed out by the fact that "in the middle of the action, [he] would squeeze a mixture of mouthwash and spirulina into [his] mouth." He revealed to the Daily Telegraph, "But that was because I needed to ooze this green, kind of black, thickish liquid out of the corners."

When filming kissing scenes in The Office, actress Angela Kinsey said her on-camera love interest Rainn Wilson, "was usually eating something disgusting right beforehand." On an episode of her podcast Office Ladies, Kinsey said, "And I'd be like, 'Rainn, dang it. Do you have to eat a tuna fish sandwich right before we're supposed to kiss? Come on!'"

As reported by The Independent, on the set of Apocalypse Now, the temple was littered with smelly trash and dead rats. Martin Sheen's wife, Janet, complained to Gray Frederickson, the producer, "You've got to clean this up. It's a health risk. I won't allow Marty to work here." Frederickson relayed the complaint to the prop department, to which they jokingly replied, “Wait till he hears about the dead bodies.”