The 1968 movie that saw Jane Fonda shat on by birds and hospitalised: “I feel absolutely flayed alive”
Sometimes actors are properly put through the wringer for the sake of a movie, but it’s often the case that we’re none the wiser about the hell they’ve been through, not until they reveal it after the fact.
This was the case for Jane Fonda, who experienced a pretty tumultuous shoot on the 1968 film Barbarella. You wouldn’t expect a campy, erotically-charged sci-fi flick to cause so much strife, but Fonda actually ended up hospitalised at one point.
The actor had risen to prominence in the early 1960s with some French pictures, even becoming the first American actor to appear nude in a foreign film when she starred in Circle of Love. The film was directed by Roger Vadim, who’d previously been married to Brigitte Bardot and shot her to fame with the risqué And God Created Woman, but now Fonda was the object of his affection, and they tied the knot in 1963.
She’d go on to appear in several more movies directed by her husband over the next few years, like The Game Is Over and Spirits of the Dead, but it was Barbarella that became their most iconic collaboration. In fact, to this day, it’s one of Fonda’s most recognisable roles, her silver swimsuit becoming a pop cultural touchstone, later referenced in Arctic Monkeys’ ‘Arabella’ while Ariana Grande paid homage to the film in her ‘Break Free’ video.
Despite the film’s legendary status in cinematic history (although that’s not to say that it’s by any means a masterpiece), Fonda had to suffer through deception from her husband and, perhaps even worse, being attacked by birds with bowel problems. When the opening scene was filmed, in which Fonda strips off while floating in space, she was assured by Vadim that audiences wouldn’t be able to see her breasts, but he didn’t stick to his word.
“Vadim promised me it would be covered up with titles, and it wasn’t,” she once revealed, “We aren’t married anymore!”
Besides this shocking betrayal that left Fonda feeling embarrassed, she also had a disastrous encounter with some birds. In a Roger Ebert interview, he explained Vadim’s great idea to have a bunch of birds rip off Barbarella’s clothing. Birdseed was placed in her costume, and Vadim blew a fan behind the birds to encourage them to move towards Fonda. What resulted was a mess of bird shit all over her.
The actor was, naturally, left feeling incredibly sick, so she was taken to the hospital, just in case. “I feel absolutely flayed alive,” she told Ebert. She further detailed the stressful ordeals she’d been through while filming, adding, “We did this scene where I get shot through the tube, and my stomach got skinned on the plastic. Ouch! So Roger decided to try it again, only this time they sprinkled the tube with talcum powder. And then it worked so well that I hurtled out the other end of the tube.”
For another scene, Vadim rigged the set with smoke bombs and flares, but didn’t tell Fonda what was going to happen. “Vadim wanted us to look natural, so he didn’t tell us what a big explosion there would be,” she said, “When the machine blew up, flames and smoke were everywhere, and sparks were running up and down the wires. I was frightened to death.”
Clearly, safeguarding regulations were pretty nonexistent during the filming of Barbarella, and it’s hardly surprising that after everything Vadim put Fonda through, she’d divorce him not long after.
