Rob Riggle improvised the penis scene in 21 Jump Street to make the crew laugh
Rob Riggle recalls improvising gruesome and hilarious scene in 21 Jump Street in a new interview with The A.V. Club
Sometimes when you watch a film you can just tell that the people making it were having a ball. Such is the case with 21 Jump Street, a set which star Rob Riggle tells The A.V. Club’s Todd Gilchrist was very conducive to improvisation. Jonah Hill, in particular, “was all about, hit me with something that I don’t see coming,” Riggle shares. “And we would do goofy things in the moment and find really fun things that were not on the page, but made the film.”
One of those things was riffing on the climactic scene where his character, Mr. Walters, was shot in the penis. “Now, while we were filming, I screamed, ‘Oh my God, that’s my dick,’ and it made the crew laugh. It was late night shooting. We were racing against the sun because that was the end of our week and we had to get the shot and everybody was exhausted. And I screamed and made everyone laugh, and we got some energy going again,” Riggle recalls.
“Then it turned into, okay, now what? Now I’m handcuffed, I can’t grab it. So I asked them to grab it for me. They say no. And again, this is all improvised,” he continues. “And when I went down to grab it with my mouth, that was a suggestion from Jonah. But there was nothing to grab, so they went to crafty and got a banana and they covered it in blood, and then I grabbed that.”
“But when I came back up, I actually bit through the banana. So it popped back out of my mouth and we’re all laughing and improvising. None of it’s on the page and we’re having a blast,” Riggle says. “And I’m thinking to myself, this is good because it’s good energy where everybody’s kind of waking up. We’re getting our second wind. But surely the good people at Sony aren’t going to put this in the movie. It’s too dirty. Well, that’s the thing—you improvise it, they get it on film, it gets a big laugh, it makes the movie.”
For more on-set improv stories–including for films like Stepbrothers, The Hangover, and The Other Guys–read Rob Riggle’s Random Roles interview here.