Betty Gilpin says the birth scene in Office Romance was so elaborate it left her “pretty freaked out” the first time she saw the prosthetic vagina built for it. The actor, who plays Sydney Bloom in the film, described the setup in a new interview published Saturday, June 6, saying the scene combined prosthetic legs, an animatronic baby and a reset process that sounded like a mechanics lesson gone wrong.
The interview is drawing attention now because Gilpin did not just describe the scene — she described the feeling of being inside it. Sydney is the pregnant executive at Cruz Air who confronts in-house lawyer Daniel Blanchflower about his clandestine romance with Jackie Cruz as her water breaks, then gives birth on a desk in his office in front of both of them. Gilpin said she first had “a nervous breakdown” on seeing the prosthetic, then reminded herself she would be “holding the ultimate working mom’s hand, Jennifer Lopez,” which is what steadied her through the take.
Gilpin’s recollection gives a rare look at how the moment was staged. She said her real legs were below a table while fake prosthetic legs covered the shot, and a puppeteer worked at her real legs to push an animatronic baby through the prosthetic vagina. The result, she said, sounded like “popping,” and resetting the scene required going under the setup, pulling the fake placenta, reaching up through the prosthetic vagina, pulling the placenta back, taking the umbilical cord and pulling it back, then pulling the baby back through. She added that the placenta is no longer in the movie.
That leaves the film with one unanswered detail that matters to viewers who are now curious about the finished scene: exactly how much of that intricate practical-effect work made it into the final cut. What is clear is that Office Romance chose practical effects over Gilpin’s actual body for the birth sequence, and that the actor’s own account has turned a single scene into the kind of behind-the-scenes story people will keep talking about long after the credits roll. Brett Goldstein cowrote the film with Joe Kelly, and it is now streaming on Netflix.
