In June, I went to the IMATS convention and attended the Masters FX True Blood panel. There, I learned how the scene with Denis O’Hare ripping out the backbone of the newscaster happened. However, now, theawl.com has actually spoken to the actor who played the newscaster, John Burke about his experience of filming that scene.
John Burke’s story:
One of season three’s most memorable, delicious, game-changing moments came when Denis O’Hare’s King Russell Edgington snapped and gorily murdered a newscaster on national TV. Burke is that newscaster.
I went twice to a special effects house in L.A., and they’re actually not as busy as they used to be because everything’s so CGI these days. They made a plaster cast around my chest, and they put a bladder in there that was filled with blood, and on the front of the chest was a little fist that would protrude when a mechanism was triggered, and they also of course made a fake spine for my back. So we put all that on, put on a shirt, cut a hole in the shirt, put my tie covering the hole, and then had a piece of fishing line attached to the tie, so that on a specific word the tie flipped up and then the fist came out and then the chest exploded with the blood. It was heavily choreographed, which added to the stress of the acting. There were three people to make the whole mechanism work: A guy to my left who hit the blood bladder to make the chest explode, a guy under the news desk with the fishing line that would flip up the tie and release the fist and one other person.
I think we did the scene about seven times, and it was just filled with blood. The whole camera crew, everybody was covered with plastic, and the thing would explode and they would descend on me with shaving cream, because apparently shaving cream gets the fake blood out of your skin, and then we’d reload and do it again. The blood itself is pretty much what you get on Halloween in any typical shop, and the consistency is kind of thin, but there’s a lot of it.
The hardest part was when [Denis/Russell] swept me off the desk. It was weird, I had to be dead and move, which was a somewhat complicated maneuver. The first time or two I didn’t get it right, and they came over and said ‘Listen, you’re dead now; you can’t lift your head; you can’t look up.’ So I kept my head down and tried to draw the least amount of attention to myself.
First we toyed with the idea that the fist would come out of my chest and I would still be somewhat conscious, so I would look down and go, oh my god I’ve got a fist coming out of my chest, but it didn’t play in the rehearsals, so I just went with what was natural, or what you would do if somebody punched you really hard in the back
It’s all about not anticipating—if I anticipated it, the scene wouldn’t have worked. After he swept me off the desk, I landed on a big foam pad and just lay there in all that blood while he ranted. I was listening to him go on and on, thinking, I don’t know if I could do what he does. Denis was just amazing; I gave him the key to the kingdom and he took it and ran with it.
Now, watch the scene as it was shown on True Blood in Season 3.
And below is the video I shot at IMATS during the Masters FX True Blood panel that includes the explanation how the scene was filmed. It starts at 6.39 minutes
