Tom Pelphrey gets naked in a man in full finale with a prosthetic penis

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “Judgment Day,” the finale of the limited series “A Man in Full,” now streaming on Netflix.

If you thought of Netflix’s “A Man in Full” as Tom Wolfe’s 1998 novel, the final episode probably came as a shock. Although the series opened with the corpse of Charlie Croker (Jeff Daniels) lying lifeless on the ground, the events leading up to it were unexpected. Charlie flashes back ten days earlier and is shown on his 60th birthday, saying a firm hello to Raymond Peepgrass (Tom Pelphrey) by grabbing the back of his collar. The moment foreshadows the finale, in which Charlie encounters his ex-wife Martha (Diane Lane) having sex with Raymond. She runs outside, leaving Raymond – completely naked and standing up after injecting Viagra – in front of Charlie.

Charlie eventually chokes Raymond in a fit of rage, then realizes he can’t let go due to an apparent heart attack. While the show ends with the deaths of both men, the novel does not; in fact, Raymond and Martha end up together. Pelphrey, however, agreed with the twist created by writer David E. Kelley and directed by Regina King.

“I probably saw the script about halfway through the season, which coincided with the end of the novel, because the novel is huge. I obviously thought that given the strangeness of the world and the world’s peculiar sense of humor, this was the right way to end it,” Pelphrey says. Variety. “I think Regina and Dave wanted to explore something in the show that maybe wasn’t as prominent in the novel, which is the idea of ​​how damn toxic these guys are.”

Kelley’s sense of humor made him want to find “the most ridiculous explosion of that toxic male energy,” Pelphrey says, and that’s where it ends. It’s a sentence Pelphrey could barely utter without a cackling laugh: “Suffocating a man with a full erection, while the man who is choking simultaneously suffers a convulsive leg attack and a heart attack.”

For the first time in his career, Pelphrey was a little nervous about taking on the “vulnerable” and “exposed” scenes because his partner, Kaley Cuoco, was pregnant with their now daughter at the time.

“I’ve had some great conversations with Regina King, which is so surreal too – like talking to one of my heroes on the phone, but you know, we’re talking about sex and penises. This is not how I daydreamed about an hour-long Regina King conversation on the phone,” he says. “All my wheels were spinning because Kaley was pregnant at the time. I knew I was going to be a father and suddenly I started thinking about everything differently, like, ‘Oh God, do I want to take my clothes off on camera?’ All things I literally never thought about, really. I always say, ‘That makes sense, let’s do it!’ Suddenly I thought, ‘I’m going to have a child, I don’t know if I want her to see this!’” In the end, it made a lot of sense. We were lucky because we had an actor directing, who has been in a million vulnerable positions himself and understands how to manage and care for that moment.

There were numerous discussions about how the all-nude scene in the finale would play out, but it was all in Kelley’s text, Pelphrey says.

“The conversation was: What is the maximum comedy penis payout? We haven’t changed a word of what David wrote, and I always let that guide every decision I make. So, based on the lyrics, we thought it was kind of funny that Raymond Peepgrass, a little buggy, could have a damn big dick,” he says, laughing. “I also thought that choice lent itself to being the most ridiculous and absurd version of how that could go – the most cheesy masculine, toxic humor. If we’re going to do it, let’s do it fully. Regina got it.”

He then worked in the prosthetics department. “God bless the man who makes these prosthetics!” Pelfrey says. “You want to be free, you want to have fun, you don’t want anyone else to be offended or weirded out.”

There was never any conversation about it not using a prosthetic, because the script very “pronounced” stated that Raymond remained upright all the way to the ambulance. “It was more the conversation about what exactly we want this prosthetic to be,” Pelphrey says.

And this was preceded by a suitable process. “There was a scary moment where part of the fitting process, as described to me, involved a lot of hot washing, which freaked me out – and we were fortunately able to avoid this. There was a lot of work, a lot of meetings, a lot of talking, a lot of adjustments to that prosthesis.”