Gen V’s giant dick wasn’t even the hardest thing to build
A tiny character can make for a huge amount of fun for a TV show’s practical effects team. Gen V, Prime Video’s excellent college-set spinoff of The Boys, is fortunate enough to have a character just like this in Emma Meyer (Lizze Broadway), a student with the ability to shrink (or grow) based on how much food she consumes or expels.
As a show set in the world of The Boys, Gen V has certain standards to uphold — namely, it has to live up to one of the most arrestingly lewd black comedies on TV, where an Aquaman-esque hero fornicates with an octopus and a shrinking man walks into a sexual partner’s urethra (built to scale).
Gen V does this and more in an early scene where Emma hooks up with a guy who asks her to get in bed with him after shrinking. The result is a very funny, very explicit sex scene where Emma scales a giant penis, one Gen V brings to life thanks to the talents of prop and prosthetics team led by Colin Penman.
Penman, however, would be starting from scratch — his team did not work on the penis tunnel built for The Boys.
“This was our first experience with a giant dick situation,” Penman told Polygon via Zoom. And like with any project done at a massive scale, you have to start small.
“Our prop master went and bought this big dildo and we had a little doll, and we were sort of working out the logistics.” Penman says. “Then we figured out the size [for the final model], which was I think it was about 6 feet, in the end.”
Once Penman and his team had their plan worked out in miniature, they could go big with the real prop, sculpted from foam, clay, wire, and silicone. Then came a surprise stress test: Broadway stopped by the set when the giant prop dick was finished but not yet painted and leapt on it,
Read more on polygon.com
