Carell famously did submit to having his chest waxed, which they obviously had to pull off in one scene if they wanted it to be authentic—so his stunned, tortured face and his buddies’ reactions in the moment are all real. “See how red my chest is,” he instructed the Rove Live host to look closely at the clip. “Now if you look really closely in the middle, you can see blood pooling right there, yeah…And that just frightens me to even watch again. I have such respect for women for being able to do that.”
On a normal day, Carell shared, “I could comb my chest hair over to my back.”
The women on set advised him to trim the hair first or take Advil (a pro waxing tip, for the record), but he decided to tough it out.
“About five seconds before they started to rip,” he recalled, “I thought, This is the worst idea I ever had in my life.” Five cameras were set up to capture the agony from all angles, “and you can see in the clip that everyone on the set is laughing. The three guys behind me, the woman who’s doing it, are in hysterics because I’m in excruciating pain—and I’m not acting, once again! This is not something you could replicate.”
Moreover, the waxer was played by an actress, Miki Mia, not an actual esthetician, or any other licensed professional. “A real waxing technician puts a little oil on your nipple before they do that,” Carell described one especially dicey maneuver. Suffice it to say, “She didn’t oil the nipple. So when she pulls on that one…you know, I’m pretty much hanging by a thread.”
He remembered, “My wife, again, was horrified. I came home that day and I had what was dubbed the ‘man-o-lantern.’ It’s two eyes, a nose and a mouth.”
As Apatow put it to ABC News that summer, “There’s nothing funnier than a bunch of guys giving really terrible advice to a guy with a good heart just trying to get through the day.”
