If you haven’t seen Barbarian yet, you should head over to HBO Max to watch it right now and come back in roughly 94 minutes. If you have, then congrats! And sorry, because it was pretty rough (in a fun way).
You may or may not recall one of the most disturbing scenes in the film where Justin Long’s jerk character is being breastfed by a human/monster hybrid that has lived in a basement since Reagan’s America. Or maybe you looked away during that scene because that’s also a very reasonable thing to do.
Director Zach Cregger recently told Yahoo! that there was an even darker scene in the script that he had originally taken out because he was afraid that Long would not want to be a part of the project. The scene involved the Mother being force-fed a dead rat, which isn’t that far-fetched from the actual plot of the movie.
Cregger explained, “I was like, ‘When he gets to Bulgaria, I will see if I can talk him into it. And so I very delicately tried to broach it. … And he was like, ‘We have to do that. We have to do that.’” This isn’t surprising considering that Long once played a podcaster who painstakingly transforms into a walrus. He’s into that stuff!
Long eventually did film the scene, but it ended up being cut. “Zach cut that out,” Long told Vulture earlier this year. “He felt like it was a bridge too far, gross-wise.” It would have been gross, yes, but is it really out of character for the basement monster who watches home-birthing VHS tapes? Probably not.
Barbarian is now streaming on HBO Max.