Since “28 Years Later” unleashed a new — and newly unclothed — horde of infected on cinemas, much has been said and written about prosthetic private parts. Chief among them: the scene-stealing specimen worn by Chi Lewis-Parry, the 6’ 9” former MMA fighter who plays Samson, the main berserker (or “Alpha”) variant of the infected in Danny Boyle’s long-awaited horror sequel. Just over a week after the film launched, it’s already achieved near-legendary status and become a TikTok sensation.
But it wasn’t always going to be prosthetic. When “28 Years Later” was in development, the initial presumption was that the actors and extras portraying those rampaging around not wearing much at all (after almost three decades, their clothes have effectively fallen apart) would be doing so in the buff.
That all changed when intimacy coordinator Vanessa Coffey heard the plans. Essentially, having a load of naked people running about wasn’t going to work for a film where one of the the lead stars (newcomer Alfie Williams, who plays Spike) was 13 years old at the time of production. A Glasgow-based Australian who has worked on the likes of “House of the Dragon,” “Vikings: Valhalla” and “Outlander,” Coffey says that explaining this to Boyle was a bit of a “mic-drop moment.” But it was one that suddenly gave the costume department a lot more work to do — and some unusual work at that.
Speaking to Variety, Coffey discusses how she joined the film long before there was any talk about naked infected, making that wild infected pregnancy scene seem “raw and really realistic” and why it was important that Lewis-Parry — even in his prosthetic — kept his robe tightly shut while wandering around off-set.
“28 Years Later” doesn’t initially seem like the sort of film that would require an intimacy coordinator. But then when you watch it and hear how it was made, it starts to become clear why it might be important. When and why were you originally brought in?
I was brought in originally during pre-production — really early days. Obviously they knew that the lead was going to be a young boy, so it was just about making sure we were doing the right thing by him. And that was even before we got into a conversation about naked infected. It was about cast care, about welfare. But it was during one of those very early meetings that Danny raised the fact that 28 years later, the infected wouldn’t be wearing many clothes. So at that point it’s about, what do we do about our young person who’s going to witness all of this? My background is as a lawyer, so I did have in the back of my head the Child Sex Offenses Act. In showing a young person specifically genitals, there’s the potential that we get into dangerous territory. And particularly if that 13-year-old is exposed to a vast number of people on set who are all showing their genitals, that feels tricky.
Yes, it definitely does.
And this is aside from all the violence that he has to witness as well, which was was also a conversation that I had with Alfie and his chaperone, who was his parent. It was about talking him through what he would see and, even with some of the prosthetics, taking him through a process of showing him what they looked like in advance so it wasn’t shocking. We also had a pregnant infected who gives birth on a train.
And she gives birth — at least as far as the films suggests — right in front of Alfie.
So that was part of the conversation. It was like, which bits does Spike need to see, which bits does he have to watch and which bits can we keep him out of the way. But it was an incredible prosthetic that was created for that scene. We had spoken through unmedicated births and what that would look or feel like, just to make it really raw and really realistic. So having a young person witness that — we were really careful about how the conversations were managed.
So what prosthetics had to be used in accordance with the legal guidelines?
It wasn’t necessarily about what was legal, it was about making sure that we were absolutely erring on the right side. So there were nipple covers or, in some cases, full breasts. And penises and other genitalia. And also hair being added, which is really helpful. We used what we call a merkin, a genital wig, to cover things. And also different states of buttocks. Some were prosthetic buttocks, but others were people’s own buttocks, but in various states, like dirtied down and with partial covering.
When I hear the term “intimacy coordinator,” I assume it’s solely for scenes relating to sex or intimacy, but it’s obviously much broader than that.
It depends on the production. But yes, it’s about cast welfare and even crew welfare. Because we also need to let our crew know that we were going to have people who are going to appear to be completely naked when they’re on set. So even though it was a prosthetic, we even asked them to cover up. It was like, “Can you please put your robe on between takes.” Because for all intents and purposes, it appears as though you’re naked.
There was a red carpet interview with Danny Boyle where he suggested it came as a bit of a shock when you explained to him that the infected couldn’t be actually naked. Was that the case?
I think he actually said in the interview that it was a “nightmare.” So thank you for that, Danny! But yeah, I was there to talk with him about a number of other scenes, and then he said, “Well, they’re all in essentially some state of undress because the clothes have worn away.” It was a bit of a mic-drop moment. We kind of went, OK, let’s think about all of this and what we need to do for our young person now, because that’s going to change things slightly.
Thank god you were still in the development stage! So it only dawned on the team then that the production would have to make rather a lot of prosthetic penises?
Yeah, that was exactly it. I think a lot of departments suddenly thought, oh no! But actually everybody pulled together really quickly. But when you think of the Berserkers, the prosthetics is quite incredible. With them, there are prosthetic buttocks as well as prosthetic penises, and everything has to be held in place, so that would always have had to have been the case. But there’s also a comfort level, I suppose, because obviously the infected run really fast and I would imagine it’s much easier to fun fast confidently across the countryside with a prosthetic attached than actually having your own genitals out.
I guess that makes sense. But when I first watched the film, I never assumed it was prosthetics.
Originally we had to have that conversation with all of the people who were potentially going to be playing infected, that there would be the semblance of nudity. There was every chance it was never going to come out in the press that we actually did use prosthetics. So in those circumstances the viewer would, of course, assume that that was that real person’s genitals. So we also were really careful with emailing everybody in advance who was coming on board saying that this was the expectation. So closed set applied for any of those scenes where we’ve got people who were in a state of undress and or seeming to be in a state of undress. We wanted people to be aware that safeguarding protocols were in place because we also didn’t want questions about what we were doing in terms of safeguarding either us or our young actor.
I spoke to Chi who played Samson recently. There’s obviously been a lot of talk about his prosthetic particularly.
Understandably, yeah.
He told me that he’s a very cuddly guy who likes to give everyone hugs, so it was a good thing that he was wearing a prosthetic.
Yeah, he’s such a lovely, comfortable human and would be walking around off set. And we were like, let’s keep that robe very tightly done up. Because it does look incredibly real and there are crew who might just be having their lunch. So let’s be mindful of that!
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