‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin’s Infamous Chest-Waxing Scene Was Real

Never say that Steve Carell isn’t committed to his craft: he entered The 40-Year-Old Virgin and almost left as “The One-Nipple Wonder.”

Perhaps the most iconic scene of the 2005 comedy is when Carell’s character, Andy Sititzer (the titular “virgin”), undergoes a chest waxing appointment. While surrounded by his friends, David (Paul Rudd), Cal (Seth Rogen), and Jay (Romany Malco), Andy goes under the wax, and the reaction is very NSFW.

And, apparently, the reaction was very real.

“We were trying to think of some makeover sequence, but that had been done to death,” director Judd Apatow told The Hollywood Reporter in honor of the film’s 20th anniversary. “So we were trying to think of an original way to approach it. Steve said, ‘Maybe you could just wax me for real, and it’ll hurt so much, it’ll be funny. People will just be able to tell that it’s actually happening.’”

“So we set up five cameras like it was a documentary and just did it,” said Apatow. “It turned out to be as funny as we hoped it would be because it’s the kind of joke you can only do one time.”

Apatow said that for the scene, he wanted to get an actress who also had experience as a professional waxer. “Miki Mia claimed to have been a waxer,” he said, “but I think maybe she had only done it once because she clearly didn’t know how to do it, and we almost ripped his nipples off during the shoot.”

The 40-Year-Old Virgin was the first film that Apatow directed, having previously written and produced films like Heavyweights and The Cable Guy. And it was a smash: audiences and critics found it had the appropriate amounts of raunchy humor and charming sincerity.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin was a box office smash, grossing $177 million at the global box office (which would be equivalent to $293 million today).