Judd Apatow reveals the secrets behind ‘The 40-year Old Virgin’ chest wax scene
Of all Judd Apatow’s semi-improvised scenes, the immortal chest-waxing sequence in The 40-Year-old Virgin has got to be the most iconic. The film bought his unique brand of humour – half improv, half carefully-scripted screwball comedy – into the mainstream. For the next decade or so, filmmakers did their best to recreate it, but it never had quite the same punch. Here, Apatow himself explains how he got such an era-defining performance from Steve Carell and the gang.
Released in 2005, The 40-Year-Old Virgin tells the tale of an inoffensive but sexually inexperienced single man, Andy Stitzer, played by Steve Carell. He is, in every sense of the word, a nerd. He spends his free time curating his action figure collection and playing video games in his solitary apartment. To get Andy into the sack, his friends begin a project to help him relieve him of his awkwardness with women. When Andy meets local shop owner Trish, things start looking up, and they begin dating.
Before he meets Trish, Stitzer’s friends convince him that he needs to wax his chest to attract women. Willing to try anything, Andy agrees to go to a waxing parlour, where he unbuttons his shirt and reveals a dense thicket of hair, causing the girl on duty to request more wax from her colleague. What follows is two minutes of classic Apatowian comedy.
With each strip of wax removed, Carell screams another colourful swear. Once he’s used up all his fucks and shits, he moves on to pop culture references, yelling “Kelly Clarkson!” at maximum volume to quench the pain. Discussing how the scene came to fruition, director Judd Apatow told Vanity Fair: “Steve said, ‘Just shoot me actually getting my chest waxed, because I’m very hairy, and I’m sure it would hurt. And it would be funny to see me in pain'”.
Apatow continued: “So we hired an actress who claimed to be a professional chest-waxer. When we shot the scene, it seemed pretty clear that she’d lied on her résumé. Steve almost lost one of his two nipples. He was bleeding—we had to use C.G.I. technology to remove most of the blood, because it was too troubling to look at”.
The director added: “Paul [Rudd] was the one who noticed that it was turning into a shape that looked like a Halloween pumpkin. And then as soon as we noticed that he was looking like a man-o’-lantern, we made a point of telling the waxer to continue in that configuration. It was really funny, and it’s all because of how Steve reacts. He’s actually in intense pain, but he completely stays in character, doing jokes while basically being tortured”.
