SPOILER ALERT: The story includes details about Episode 6 of HBO Max‘s Stuart Fails To Save the Universe.
In Episode 6 of HBO Max’s Stuart Fails To Save the Universe, the quartet of accidental heroes Stuart Bloom (Kevin Sussman), Denise (Lauren Lapkus), Bert (Brian Posehn) and Barry Kripke (John Ross Bowie) find themselves in a universe where people have descended from cows; they eat plants and chew their cud.
Kripke and Bert want to leave, Stuart and Denise opt to stay, leading to the former duo being stuck falling in an endless void in-between universes. After meeting a new version of Raj (Kunal Nayyar) — who does not mention the broken device his post-apocalyptic self almost fixed in the first episode — and getting scolded by Stuart from another dimension, Stuart and Denise somehow order a second copy of the machine and soon find themselves falling through the void alongside Kripke and Bert.
Turns out the horror on their faces was not just acting but the screams were hard to muster, Sussman and Lapkus told Deadline.
“There were so many things that were crazy, I think being in the Matrix was insane, we were all with our bald caps in goo pods, and then we were on high wires, like flying, being dropped 30 feet in the air to shoot the falling-through-the-void scene, that was very scary,” Lapkus said about their experience filming Season 1 of the Big Bang Theory spinoff.
“The high wire one in particular, the scene was we’re being dropped, falling through the air, and we’re supposed to be screaming,” Sussman said. “And what Lauren and I discovered both simultaneously the first time we were dropped, it was so much faster and scarier than we thought that neither of us were able to scream.”
Added Lapkus, “When you’re actually scared, you can’t scream. It’s kind of like those nightmares that I’ve had over and over again, where I’m trying to scream and I can’t. When you’re falling and you’re actually scared, you just swallow it, we’re choking. Yeah, it was terrifying.” (You can watch the video below.)
Speaking of choking, there was a lot of that in the episode with all the food regurgitating.
“Lots of hay, lots of grass, yeah, lots of choking,” Lapkus said.
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