Spoilers for Office Romance can be found in this article, and I’m not going to lie to you, they are graphic. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
There’s nothing like an unexpected and graphic birth scene to really wake you up on a bright and sunny Saturday morning. I found this out the hard way this weekend, when I put on Jennifer Lopez and Brett Goldstein’s intentionally awkward new Netflix release Office Romance, and was confronted with a prosthetic vagina about three fourths of the way through the film. Yes, the movie really included it as one of its many unexpected storylines.
No, Jennifer Lopez Is Not Involved In The Graphic Birth Scene
While the "flirty" JLo and Brett Goldstein do seem to be playing characters of similar ages in Office Romance, meaning she’s seemingly playing a little younger, the only character having a baby in this movie is Betty Gilpin’s Sydney Bloom. It’s a recurring joke in the movie that Sydney is heavily pregnant and should have already gone on maternity leave, but she’s just way too dedicated to the job.
So dedicated, in fact, that while she’s chewing out Goldstein’s Daniel Branchflower (excellent character name I might add), her water breaks. No big deal, I’ve seen this a million times in movies. But then she ultimately has the baby in the office, and it is shown onscreen with no punches pulled.
I honestly thought the whole thing was CGI, but then Gilpin told Variety it was an entire production involving an animatronic baby and a puppeteer, which somehow makes the whole thing even wilder.
My real legs were below a table, [I had] fake prosthetic legs, and then a puppeteer was standing at my real legs pushing an animatronic baby out of my prosthetic vagina, and it made it sound like [Gilpin makes a popping sound]…It was insane.
I want to believe in the beauty of birth, but the scene's cringe-inducing given the context of when the birth scene happens, how she’s having the baby in front of coworkers, and how much the audience sees. I also just would like to point out that I didn’t go into Office Romance thinking, “Oh boy, I hope I’m confronted with the joys of populating the Earth” today. I thought I was going to get Lopez and Goldstein making out on the beach somewhere. I, in fact, did get that; this was just a bonus.
Gilpin went on to reveal that originally the scene went even harder before the final draft hit the movie release schedule. The creatives had planned to show her birthing the placenta after the baby came out. She apparently shot this over and over, but it didn’t make the final product.
The saddest part was when the scene was over and everybody but the puppeteers stayed in the room because the only way to reset was to go under and pull the fake placenta — I think the placenta is not in the movie anymore – but reach up through the prosthetic vagina that I am still zipped into, pull the placenta back and take the umbilical cord and pull it back and then pull the baby back through, and then it was time to do it again.
I'm not really sorry to hear it. Listen, even Gilpin was “freaked out” by having to film with the prosthetic vagina. Thank goodness for great rom-com actress Jennifer Lopez. The actress said it was her co-star who ultimately made her feel comfortable about going with the flow on set.
Honestly, I was pretty freaked out when I first saw the prosthetic vagina. I had a nervous breakdown and then I was like, ‘Oh, but I’ll be holding the ultimate working mom’s hand, Jennifer Lopez, so what could go wrong?
I’m sure there are millions of families out there who have gone through childbirth that will find this scene to be a blip in the movie, and possibly a very funny moment. It does lead to one of the funnier whisper fight moments in the movie, as we pointed out in our Office Romance review roundup.
Yet something about the way the scene is shot and how much we are shown combined with the context of this just being a random rom-com had me fully shook up. It’s certainly something people will be talking about.
Office Romance is streaming on Netflix now.
