“I can’t not wipe my arse”: The scene that sums up Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s unique commitment to characters
For very good reasons, you don’t often see people using the toilet in movies.
Much as we like to see actors really getting in character, and sometimes films can reflect real life back at us in the most affecting of ways, we don’t really need to watch someone sitting on the porcelain throne straining like their life depends on it. And so the number of scatological scenes remains mercifully few, although Aaron Taylor-Johnson has contributed a memorable one.
The scene in question came in Tom Ford’s 2016 thriller Nocturnal Animals, in which Taylor-Johnson played a sadistic gang leader who kidnaps Isla Fisher’s character and her daughter, causing her husband Jake Gyllenhaal to come and find her with some very deadly results.
It’s all done in a particularly stylish manner, which isn’t surprising given Ford was the director, but Taylor-Johnson’s character, Ray, is not a pleasant one to say the least. And that was solidified, if you pardon my French, by one particular scene where he has to do a number two, and to make it worse, without wearing any clothes.
Asked by Awards Daily what it was like to film that scene, Taylor-Johnson said, “I just laughed, me completely naked on a toilet. He [Ford] said,…’Your guy is a plumber with this toilet outside, and you’re taking this shit when they find you’. I thought, cool. I was stark naked. He said, ‘I think you’re on the toilet, drinking a beer?’ And I said, ‘Maybe I’m smoking a cigarette, so when they come along, I’m going to put it out between my bollocks or put it out in the toilet. Or spit?’”
All of which is…lovely obviously. But that particular back and forth didn’t spell an end to the gratuitous moment, because there was still the small matter of what to do to finish things off. And ATJ went for what most of us do, adding, “I didn’t think it all the way through because I went to wipe my ass. He said, ‘What are you doing? I don’t want to see that’. I told him, ‘Well, I’ve just taken a shit. I can’t not wipe my arse’. So we did it, it got kept in.”
Taylor-Johnson’s discomfort wasn’t over however, because he managed to flick the cigarette between his legs and into the toilet, where it promptly set fire to the paper inside and almost singed his nether regions.
Now, some particularly cruel critics might say that represents the best bit of the film, because Ford can be polarising, but Nocturnal Animals did pretty well at the box office and Taylor-Johnson certainly got the reward that his going the extra mile deserved, because the following year he picked up ‘Best Supporting Actor’ at The Golden Globes.
These days, he’s more of a bulked-up action hero than someone who sets fire to himself on the toilet, and after his work on the superhero movie Kraken the Hunter and last year’s zombie sequel 28 Years Later, he’s now appearing in a heist film made by Sky called Fuze. Co-starring Avatar’s Sam Worthington and Theo James, it tells the story of the discovery of an unexploded WWII bomb in the middle of London and the chaos that ensues as our hunky heroes try to diffuse it.
