[Warning: this story contains spoilers for Black Bear’s Wicker.]
The internet went feral over Alexander Skarsgård’s wicker penis in the highly anticipated romantic fantasy Wicker that hit theaters on Friday. However, it almost didn’t make the cut.
“The wicker man was already designed, the prosthetic face and the upper body,” costume designer Tóth András Dániel recalls. “And just one week before the shoot started, the directors [Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer] came up with this idea: ‘He’s so sexy. We should see him naked.'”
Fans clearly agreed. After a Wicker teaser dropped in August, the internet instantly got hot and bothered over this attractive man made from wicker. The film, based on author Ursula Wills-Jones’s short story, The Wicker Husband, follows a fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) who commissions the local basketmaker (Peter Dinklage) to weave her a husband (Skarsgård), sparking jealousy and chaos in the quiet village.
The character’s masculine build initially caught the horny BookTok girlies’ attention, but it was the thought of what’s underneath Skarsgård’s tailored suit that had them really drooling. “Hell yeah! 50 shades of Pinocchio!” and “The bar is so low for men we’re romanticizing baskets” were among thousands of similar comments shared on social media at the time.
Wētā Workshop, which designs specialty costumes for film and television, worked with 50 people for a year to build the upper half of Skarsgård’s wicker suit. The attention to detail was evident from the way the suit moved to how it blended in with the prosthetic face.
However, Dániel and fellow costume designer Attila Godena-Juhász had a much harder task when it came to creating the lower half, as time wasn’t on their side.
“There was no time for Wētā to prepare the whole bottom part of [Alexander’s suit], including the wicker penis, which was such a big subject about the size and everything,” Dániel says, adding, “We had one week with four people in the workshop to seamlessly continue the wicker bottom part.”
Given that the costume designers had different materials to work with than Wētā, Dániel says they “had to experiment and invent a kind of new technology” to mimic what was already created.
“Attila came up with this idea that we should use this special paint that you can see printed on textile, and if you treat it with heat, it gets three-dimensional,” he explains. “So it’s really giving you this woven textile feeling, but that was still [the color] white. So every little detail we had to hand-paint with tiny brushes and shade it and match it with the color that was used for the whole upper prosthetics.”
Unfortunately for fans who had been eagerly hoping to see Skarsgård’s wicker member up close and personal in the film, they might be slightly disappointed. The only full frontal is when the fisherwoman (Colman) is looking at the nude wicker man off in the distance in the water.
That was intentional. “That was a decision from the directors,” Dániel says. “They just wanted to give the audience a peek of him being naked, but they don’t want it to show everything.”
However, for audiences still pondering, this writer — who got a close-up look at the lower half of Skarsgård’s costume before it was painted, via a photo from the costumers — can confirm Colman’s fisherwoman definitely wasn’t complaining about size.
Skarsgård’s wicker willy wasn’t the only thing that was impressive, but rather his whole physique. And Dániel and Godena-Juhász took that into account when dressing him.
“Because Alex is such a huge guy, with the prosthetic on, it made him even bigger and more muscular. So the idea was that his costumes shouldn’t fit perfectly because nobody was prepared that one day a wicker man would knock on their door and ask for a suit,” Dániel explains to THR. “The lengths are shorter on purpose because it really gives you the feeling that at first he’s such a huge man.”
Going into the film, it was important for the filmmakers to create “this sexy beast as realistic as it can be,” Dániel says.
Ahead of release, multiple people on social media posed a question about the logistics of having sex with a man with a wicker penis. One wrote: “Can you imagine the splinters?”
These are obviously fictional problems, but Dániel reassures that “the bottom part was 3D printed in a special rubber-like material,” with Godena-Juhász adding that it’s “obviously softer than the real wicker.”
The costume designers also got a kick out of the film and their creation transcending into the mainstream. Even IKEA got into the game, marketing its rattan furniture as “husband material.”
Dániel says, “That was our goal: to do something that can inspire mainstream fashion. But it was still a surprise that the hype is so big around the movie.”
Wicker, also starring Elizabeth Debicki and Richard E. Grant, is currently playing in theaters.
