Fake wangs have been peeking through over the last several months, and they’ve all been on the hefty side.
Walton Goggins wore a large dangling sausage in a water-skiing scene in HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones. Jason Isaacs briefly flashed about halfway through Season 3 of The White Lotus. And Joaquin Pheonix is clearly wearing one during a brief disrobing sequence in Ari Aster‘s Eddington, which I just saw in Cannes.
You know right away because Joaquin’s appendage is bigger, longer and thigh-slappier than expected.
Which is why actors are down with realistic bendy-wendies. We’re all in on the game of pretending to have large schlongs, but they enhance an actor’s masculinity all the same.
One thing you don’t want to do is wear an appendage that makes your package look smaller than expected.
Adam Scott did this in Patrick Brice‘s The Overnight (’15). His character was deeply bothered about having a small junk, and so Scott’s character was wearing a small-dick prosthetic. I don’t think it mattered if audiences knew that or not. The fakey-wakey looked like a #2 pencil.
I’d be lying if I said this bizarre scene (Scott and costar Jason Schwartzman dancing nude in front of their wives) didn’t make me feel uncomfortable. Truth be told, it’s one reason why I’ve never wanted to watch Severance. I can’t get rid of the association.
There’s no question that growers who do nude scenes risk — risk, not ensure — career damage. The nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Ken Russell‘s Women in Love didn’t exactly suggest associations with horses or elephants, but the editing saved them. Cillian Murphy did himself no favors when he allowed Danny Boyle and Anthony Dod Mantle to briefly glimpse his package in 28 Days Later.
Guys performing nude should always work up a little heft before the director says “action!” A former girlfriend who used to work for Viva, the women’s magazine that ran nude male centerfolds, once told me that photographers always wanted their male subjects to be in a state of “maximum tumescence in repose.” One way not to look like you’re “hung like a cashew” (a devastating phrase coined by James Ellroy) is to pop Viagra or Cialis. In the military drill sergeants refer to low-level soldiers as “swinging dicks” — said medications actually allow that condition to manifest.