The new twisted fairytale romance Wicker is responsible for one of the year’s most dramatic transformations.
In the new film, Olivia Colman plays a lonely fisherwoman in medieval times, who asks her local basket-weaver to make her a husband, only for him to come to life and turn her life upside down.
Alexander Skarsgård plays the movie’s unlikely heartthrob, donning elaborate prosthetics to play the character known only as the Wicker Husband.
Before Wicker’s release, much was made in the press about Alexander’s on-screen transformation, as well as its many racy scenes.
However, what people probably hadn’t anticipated was that these two ideas would overlap in one of Wicker’s most memorable sequences.
Yes, we’re talking about Alexander’s wicker penis.
In one stand-out moment, Olivia’s fisherwoman looks on to see her beau bathing in a nearby stream – during which viewers catch a glimpse of the Wicker Husband fully nude.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, costume designer Tóth András Dániel admitted most of Alexander’s look had already been designed when directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer had the idea for the wicker penis.
“The wicker man was already designed, the prosthetic face and the upper body,” Tóth András said. “And just one week before the shoot started, the directors came up with this idea: ‘He’s so sexy. We should see him naked’.”
Given they only had a few days’ notice, the creative team had to think fast when it came to how they’d make this idea a reality, “which was such a big subject about the size and everything”.
Tóth admitted: “We had one week with four people in the workshop to seamlessly continue the wicker bottom part.”
Creative studio Wētā Workshop had already devised most of Alexander’s costume and prosthetics by this point, so Tóth and his team had to “experiment and invent a kind of new technology” to make the Wicker Husband’s lower half blend seamlessly with limited time.
Per IndieWire, the finished product was “pants that seamlessly mimic the prosthetics”.
“We invented a technique: printing on an elastic base with a special paint that, if you treat it with heat, it’s three-dimensional… wicker penis included,” Tóth told the outlet.
Meanwhile, makeup artist Sarah Rubano explained to Variety: “[Costume designers András Dániel Tóth and Attila Godena-Juhász] fabricated the wicker ween for the full-body river shot.
“They did such a great job because it was very last minute, but it’s puff spandex. The weave was 3D, so there was dimension to it. From a distance, they colour-matched it so beautifully.”
And if anyone was a little disappointed at the brevity of the Wicker Husband’s nude scene – rest assured that was the point.
“That was a decision from the directors,” Tóth claimed during his Hollywood Reporter interview. “They just wanted to give the audience a peek of him being naked, but they don’t want it to show everything.”
Wicker is in cinemas now.
