‘Midsommar’ Actor Jack Reynor Has Explained Why He Pushed For As Much Male Nudity As Possible In The Film

Director Ari Aster’s Hereditary followup, Midsommar, has been applauded by our own Vince Mancini as a masterpiece and by Jordan Peele as an iconic entry into the horror genre. The film follows an American couple’s terrifying trip to a Swedish commune where disturbing, clique-y antics begin to unfold on the summer solstice. Among the movie’s many highly disturbing scenes, Jack Reynor’s character gets drugged up and forced to participate in a ritual where he goes full frontal. He discussed the scene’s gory details with SPOILERS at Thrillist, where Reynor says that the scene took two weeks to film.

Reynor also got real while speaking to The Wrap about why he wanted to make sure that the scene kept him as nude as possible. In short, he’s a horror fan who knows all too well how many genre entries are perceived as exploitative towards women, and Reynor thought it was important to turn the tables:

“There are so many films in the history of cinema, particularly in the horror genre — I watch a lot of this stuff, and I notice there’s a pervasive culture of really difficult and humiliating and expositional scenes of murder and sexual violence towards women and you don’t really see that kind of stuff in films where it happens to men.”

Reynor was quick to follow up with saying that his character’s fate, which is terrible, still isn’t a drop in the bucket compared to what happens in Wes Craven’s 1972 film, The Last House on the Left. That movie contains a rape scene in addition to a great deal of other graphic violence against women, and there are loads of other horror movies that do the same, including 1978’s notorious I Spit on Your Grave. For that reason, Reynor says that he wanted to do what was possible to include a “very kind of humiliating sequence” for his male character that included “as much full frontal as we could go for.” He succeeded on that end, and Midsommar is currently in theaters.