Jenny Beavan is a living legend in the world of film. A three-time Oscar-winning costume designer, she gave Merchant Ivory films their distinctive look but was equally responsible for the visual onslaught of Mad Max: Fury Road.
In 2016, her decision to attend various awards shows wearing unconventional fashion captured the zeitgeist twice; first when Stephen Fry called her a “bag lady” and was forced off Twitter, and second when a clip of Alejandro González Iñárritu glowering as she passed him went viral. In other words, Jenny Beavan can do whatever the hell she likes.
And she has. In an interview with the Telegraph, Beavan has decided to offer us a peek into her working world, by revealing that actors don’t wear pants very often. “It’s astonishing the number of male actors who don’t wear underwear,” she said. “I’ve had to go out and buy them pants – not Calvin Klein or anything like that; I usually get them from Marks – otherwise they try to hide themselves behind a chair looking marginally awkward. I think, ‘For God’s sake, if I was going to a fitting and trying on second-hand clothes I’d wear some pants’”.
She has a point. Being fitted for costumes is an integral part of an actor’s job. Indeed, it is only during this process that many of them begin to understand the role that they have agreed to play. So with that in mind – if you knew that a vital aspect of your professional life will involve taking off your trousers in front of a respected head of department – wouldn’t you try to remember to put on some underpants before you left the house?
Especially in this day and age. The #MeToo movement has done wonders in the last eight years, illuminating the sorts of abuses of power that the industry used to tolerate. And while dropping your trousers to reveal that you’re not wearing anything underneath may rank fairly low on the spectrum of showbiz impropriety, the culprits are still putting costume designers in a position of potential embarrassment. You’d think that in today’s culture, in which an exposed penis can end a career in a heartbeat, they’d all frankly be too scared to go pantless.
And, moral outrage aside, why? Why forgo underwear in any circumstance? Underwear is really useful. It offers support and protection in equal measure. Have none of these actors ever had to break into an unexpected sprint? Testicular torsion is a real thing, and can in extreme cases lead to injuries so severe that removal is the only option. Are these actors so cavalier in their attitudes to free-swinging genitalia that they’re willing to risk testicular amputation in the pursuit of their favoured lifestyle?
It’s not worth speculating … Daniel Day Lewis in A Room With a View (1986). Photograph: Goldcrest/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
Have none of them ever had to rush away from the toilet before they’ve been able to satisfactorily conclude their post-urination shake? Has a DPD driver never knocked on their front door while they were mid-stream? Has a smoke alarm never gone off? Have they never heard their toddler squeal “Look daddy, a knife!” from another room? You’d have to assume not, because if any of these things had happened, they would understand that a major benefit of underwear is to act as a drip blotter. Underwear is often the only reason men don’t walk around with little wet patches on their trousers. And actors are willing to relinquish this? Crazy.
Obviously, the worst thing to do would be to systematically parse every project on which Jenny Beavan has worked and try to figure out which actors she is referring to. This is a woman who has been in gainful employment for close to half a century, and the list of actors she has worked with is practically endless. She worked with Daniel Day-Lewis on A Room With a View, with Anthony Hopkins on The Remains of the Day, with Robert Downey Jr on Sherlock Holmes, with Frankie Howerd on HMS Pinafore. She could have been referring to any one of them – or none of them at all – but the identities don’t really matter. We are clearly in the midst of a pantless actor epidemic. May god have mercy on their laundry.
