Reedus shares the naked truth
Walking Dead star bares his, uh, soul
Norman Reedus prefers being naked on set to wearing a “little sock” over his manhood.
The 48-year-old actor has landed the role of a lifetime as Daryl Dixon on cult TV show The Walking Dead, the last season of which his alter ego spent a majority of the episodes undressed and being tortured.
Luckily Reedus isn’t fazed by stripping off for the job as he actually prefers baring it all over relying on a small piece of material to hide his manhood.
Discussing the scenes on Monday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, the star said, “The thing is, they give you this little sock to wear and you feel weirder with the sock on, you know?”
As curious host Kimmel quizzed Reedus about the sock and whether it’s one that has a heel and toe section or is a “specially designed sock,” the actor clarified it’s more like a “pantyhose-looking thing.”
“I did a movie in a shower and they gave me one to wear and in the middle of the take I just ripped it off and threw it at the director’s head because, I was like, this is ridiculous,” he said. “But on The Walking Dead I came out in a bathrobe and our poor camera crew are all right here (signals a line of people) and I just dropped the robe and I was butt naked. And they all, kind of like they were watching Wimbledon (tennis), they all sort of looked to the left.”
He also joked that he’s become close to a makeup artist who was tasked with “dirtying” certain areas of his body during the series.
Despite becoming a household name thanks to the horror program, about the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, Reedus didn’t receive a lot of support when first approached to star in it, as he recalled, “It was one of those scripts you get and everyone’s like, ‘Don’t do it.’ It was a stretch, it was out there, you know, but I saw a guy looking for his family and saw a real story and it paid off.” WENN
Activist and artist Ai Weiwei is known for his role in such documentaries as Andreas Johnsen’s The Fake Case and Alison Klay- man’s Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, both dealing with his clashes with the Chinese government. His artwork famously criticized its handling of a 2008 earthquake that killed thousands of students in poorly constructed schools.
Now the 60-year-old has embarked on a major role as director of Human Flow, a documentary that chronicles the issue of refugee migration across the planet. Travelling through Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and North America, he finds vast populations on the move, but often penned in by a growing number of physical and bureaucratic barriers.
“It’s my personal journey,” he says during a stop in Toronto to promote the film. “I had to make contact with those refugees, to see them as part of me, or to see myself as part of them.”
By the end of his year-long, 23-nation journey, Ai discovered that the refugee crisis has many faces, from Palestinians uprooted for generations to more recent upheavals in Iraq and Syria, and developing situations as in Myanmar. But what struck him most were the similarities of the people he met.
“Technically, the Africans are very different from the Middle East,” he says. “But I think there can be one solution, which is about defending human dignity and humanity. In that, we can find a common ground in dealing with different types of refugees — some are historical, some happened recently or are going to happen more in the future.
“That’s why our film is trying to show the humanity in every aspect, and to say here is something we all have in common; we all can identify with this. The solution has to have this foundation; otherwise people have all kinds of excuses for their own behaviour.”
He mentions Germany and Canada as two nations that have tried to deal humanely with the refugee crisis. “I think the attitude toward refugees clearly shows how we think about ourselves,” he says. “Canadians are a nation structured by immigrants, and people know what it means to have the possibility of a safe shelter and space to develop the society and the individual. It shows what kind of confidence ... and what kind of vision that nation has. It’s really about self-identity.”
Ultimately, Ai hopes the scope of the film will leave people with the understanding that refugee issues are not a Canadian or Syrian or European problem, but a global issue.
“That concept has to be repeatedly announced because as human beings we need to understand that if one person’s rights are being violated, we’re all being put in the shadow of letting that happen. This is just something where we will never find an excuse to turn our face away. We have to recognize we are part of this refugee crisis, this human crisis.”
Human Flow opens Oct. 27 in Vancouver, with other cities to follow. cknight@postmedia.com twitter.com/chrisknightfilm