It’s been four months since Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe’s profoundly puerile (and possibly just profound) Swiss Army Man triumphantly jet-ski-farted its way into theaters. Now, the movie is about to reach a wider (if still distinctly niche) market, arriving on Blu-ray tomorrow in all its corpse-lugging glory. To celebrate the release, we’ve got an exclusive behind-the-scenes clip from the making of the film, centered on one of its most notable and enthusiastic props. Which is to say, this is a clip all about Daniel Radcliffe’s wildly flailing robot dick.
People who’ve seen the movie know that Dano’s stranded Hank uses his corpse-friend Manny’s penis as a sort of compass to guide him on his quest, in what is both a pretty complicated metaphor about love, lust, and hope, and also an opportunity for a staggering number of jokes about quasi-magical hard-ons. “But how did they get the penis to move?” movie-goers might have loudly asked themselves while they watched the film, content in the knowledge that their theater faux-paux would be masked by the sound of yet another on-screen burst of flatulence.
In the past—as in previous work from the film’s directors the Daniels (who apparently enjoy this particular cinematic theme)—you might just thrust a broom handle up between a guy’s legs. Not so in Swiss Army Man, where to achieve their stated goal—i.e., “we wanted Radcliffe’s wiener to move”—they constructed an elaborate remote-control phallus to replicate his powerful post-mortem priapism. “Old-school animatronics,” one of the film’s crew remarks, as the exposed apparatus jerks merrily around in his hands. “The way they should be done.”
