Suffering for her art: the movie that made Jane Fonda feel “absolutely flayed alive”
Suffering is part of the process for many actors, who take it upon themselves to immerse themselves so deeply into character that they emerge as a different person on the other side. That wasn’t quite the case in a figurative sense for Jane Fonda, but it was perilously close, literally.
While she never subscribed entirely to the method technique – which might have been down to her legendary father having such a strong distaste for the approach – Fonda nonetheless prepared exhaustively and rigorously for her most prominent roles.
Whether it was accompanying madams before she shot Klute, diving deep into what made Lillian Hellman tick in the biographical drama Julia, or using her own friendship with Born on the Fourth of July subject Ron Kovic as the inspiration behind the self-produced Coming Home, she was hardly averse to bringing real experiences to the screen.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t exactly a point of reference when she played a cosmic adventurer tasked by the government of Earth to head out on a space odyssey designed to thwart the creation and deployment of a weapon with the potential to destroy humanity in the sexually-charged cult favourite Barbarella.
A star-making performance that came right on the cusp of her evolution into a regular fixture of awards season, it stands to reason that Fonda may have been willing to push herself that little bit further, given that Barbarella was directed by her then-husband Roger Vadim.
Thanks to the various substances, concoctions, and gooey creations used to realise the far-flung world of the film, Fonda was being scraped, skinned, and bounded around like there was no tomorrow. “I feel absolutely flayed alive,” she told Roger Ebert. “First they put the plaster on without anything on underneath and took off about seven yards of skin. And my tummy was sore to begin with. See, in the planet I land on, people travel by being shot through plastic tubes by compressed air.”
When she did end up getting shot through that very tube, her “stomach got skinned on the plastic.” When Vadim wanted to add some extra oomph to a set piece, he decided to bring in more flares and smoke bombs than previously anticipated, which ended up both scaring her half to death and enhancing her performance in a way.
“When the machine blew up, flames and smoke were everywhere, and sparks were running up and down the wires,” Fonda said. “I was frightened to death, and poor Milo [O’Shea] was convinced something had really gone wrong and I was being electrocuted.”
It sounds like an arduous undertaking that wasn’t without its inherent dangers, but Fonda emerged relatively unscathed with a ridiculous sci-fi romp to her name, one that did its job by pushing her ever closer towards Hollywood superstardom.
