The Room is so full of bizarre scenes that you may not even catch them all the first time. One of the more shocking moments features femme fatale Juliette Danielle reciting dialogue as a strange bulge protrudes from her neck.
Ari Graynor plays Danielle in The Disaster Artist, a film about the making of The Room. The neck scene is not featured in The Disaster Artist, but not for lack of trying.
“We tried to do that,” Graynor said. “I kept trying to do something weird with my neck. Maybe that’ll make it onto the DVD extras.”
Screenwriter Michael Weber was on set the day Graynor tried to perform Danielle’s neck gaffe. He was impressed.
“She got pretty good at it actually,” Weber said. “It took her a few takes. I remember watching the monitor that day. It felt like a sporting event, like, ‘Did she? Oh, not that one. Try again.’”
If you go to a screening of The Room, audience members might cry out, “What is that?” as the bulge keeps appearing throughout the scene. Graynor thinks this may have a very simple explanation.
“I did a scene in something else, I was getting myself all riled up but it was really still and you can see my heart beating through my neck,” she said. “I think that’s probably what it was. Sometimes when you talk a certain way…so we were playing around with all that. It’s probably less of an interesting mystery than just weird body movements.”
The Disaster Artist does feature other classic The Room scenes. The cast painstakingly recreated every awkward detail.
“It goes against every acting instinct you have as we were recreating some of those scenes,” Graynor said.
Fans of The Room will know which ones she’s talking about.
“Getting the red dress is a pretty spectacular moment,” Graynor recalled. “The ‘You’re tearing me apart, Lisa.’ When they have that weird drunken party and she has the tie around her head. They’re all sort of wonderful in their own weird ways.”
The Disaster Artist opens in select theaters December 1 and everywhere December 8. Check back for more interviews with the writers and cast members of The Disaster Artist here on Monsters and Critics.