Faking It: How The Unsettlingly Lifelike Prosthetic Penis In The Package Got Made

Welcome to Faking It, our guide to the magic of filmmaking. What exactly are two actors doing when they're "having sex" on camera? How do they "do drugs?" What are those phony cigarettes really made of? Join us as we explore the not-so-glamorous underground of faking sex, drugs, violence, and more.

Twenty minutes into the new Netflix movie The Package, the movie’s real star makes its debut. After being severed from the body of high schooler Jeremy Abelar (Eduardo Franco), his penis hurtles through the night sky, arcs past the full moon, and thuds onto the forest floor. The penis’s adventures have only just begun. Like a wide-eyed college freshman, many new experiences await our phallic friend. Over the course of the movie, the penis will be covered in vomit, roasted over a campfire like a marshmallow, bitten by a snake, attached to another man’s body, and then cut back off again.

Given its admittedly gruesome premise, The Package could easily have been a drama about the lifelong trauma of a teenage boy losing a body part essential to both reproduction and pleasure. Instead, it’s a raunchy, hilarious comedy that dwells on the actual mechanics of reuniting man and missing appendage.

The Package’s success was contingent on one key element: a convincing member. No matter how endearing the actors were (and they were!), no matter how genuinely funny the movie was (and it was!), if the penis looked like a plastic worm, The Package wouldn't work. Luckily, The Package features a prosthetic penis so lifelike your stomach will be flipping throughout the film's hour-and-a-half long run.

Special effects supervisor Woodruff Jr. and his creative partner, Alec Gillis, are responsible for creating some of cinema's most memorable characters, from the creatures in Alien vs. Predator to Pennywise the Clown in 2017's It. In 1993, they won a Best Special Effects Oscar for creating the animatronic versions of Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her.

And now, they're creating teenage penises. “We’re on a trajectory that’s exactly the opposite of how most people get into the movie business," Woodruff Jr. said, joking about their journey from Oscar-winning animatronics to flying penises. Here's how they pulled off The Package's running gag.