‘Wax’ Cast Finds Filming a House of Pain

By: Hanh Ngyyen
Posted In: Entertainment

LOS ANGELES- Imagine fleeing for your life through the woods. Now imagine doing it barefoot and clad only in red lingerie.

Paris Hilton had that dubious honor for her big-screen acting debut in “House of Wax,” the latest Dark Castle horror remake opening nationwide Friday.

“My feet were all cut up,” the celebutante tells Zap2it.com. “It was a real forest, and we were really running through it. I was bumping into trees and I couldn’t see. It was scary.”

Although the film’s cast only had to pretend to fend off a psychotic killer, on the set they endured real physical challenges: from struggling with sets and prosthetics to suffering injuries and fatigue.

“It was pretty brutal, but … it was worth all the running around in the forest and getting killed,” says Hilton with a laugh, referring to her highly publicized screen death.

“House of Wax” centers on a group of randy friends who are sidelined by car problems during a road trip to the big game. They’re forced to seek help in the backwater town of Ambrose and soon discover that a killer is targeting them to make them permanent additions to a wax museum.

As the film’s first victim, Jared Padalecki’s character is encased alive in wax and then posed mute and immobile in the museum. For the latter scene, Padalecki and a dummy resembling him were filmed separately in the same pose, so that the combined footage would show a wax figure with the moving eyes of a live person inside.

“You stay still and you can’t blink and you’re just looking around,” he explains. “It’s so weird because you want to be expressive as an actor, (but) you feel like jerking a little bit, they’re like, `Oh, you jerked out of the way. You have to get back in (to the same pose).'”

Co-star Chad Michael Murray had his own claustrophobic experience involving wax. For the climactic scene in which the museum literally begins to melt and burn, the actor reveals how he was slipping around in a compound created to look like melted wax but wasn’t as hot as the real thing.

“I’m wrestling around with one of the villains, and … we sank right down to the bottom,” Murray says. “In order to get out, it took two or three guys to actually pull you out.

“You went home every day and all you wanted was a shower, because you had wax everywhere,” he adds. “It sticks to your hair. It’s horrible.”

Elisha Cuthbert, who plays Murray’s sister in the film, couldn’t stay clean either. Her character Carly gets grimy from sliding down a muddy embankment, bludgeoning someone with a baseball bat, plunging into a pit full of roadkill and clawing through a wall of wax.

“I think I went through the most- not prosthetics, but gore, blood, goo, you know, everything,” she says.

One harrowing scene that took four days to shoot involves Carly struggling with Ambrose resident Bo, played by Brian Van Holt, who forcibly straps her to a chair.

“Unfortunately when he backhands me I did get hit one time. Obviously not (Brian’s) fault, but it was painful,” says Cuthbert. “When you’re working that closely with an actor it’s almost like a dance. We’re constantly going back and forth: `Are you OK? Did I hurt you?'”

Bo also superglues Carly’s lips shu, t so she can’t scream to alert her friends. Desperate, she pries her lips apart with her fingers, creating a bloodily gruesome lip stain.

“I cannot act my lips tearing apart from each other so I said `Bring the glue. Let’s do this because I do not want this to look fake,'” Cuthbert explains. “We superglue it together. I’m breathing out of my nose and all of a sudden … we tear them apart.”

Even though the cast was privy to the moviemaking magic, they still found themselves reacting to the film’s scarier scenes while watching an early screening.

“I’m glad I saw it before the premiere because I was literally sitting on the edge of my seat. I was screaming and covering my eyes because it was so gross,” says Hilton. “If I did that at the premiere, I’d be so embarrassed.”

Instead, she’s nervous about her family’s reaction to one of her more physically bold scenes in the film.

“I’m embarrassed for them to see the stripping scene. I’m gonna be sitting in the theater like (this),” she says, covering her eyes in mortification. “It’s not that bad, but still my dad’s gonna be sitting there.”

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