After Life star Tony Way has revealed the one scene in season three which led Ricky Gervais to question if he’d gone “too far”.
Gervais created and stars in the Netflix dark comedy, which follows a man called Tony dealing with the aftermath of the death of his wife.
While Tony uses his grief to punish the world by doing whatever he wants, Way – who plays photographer Lenny – has admitted that there was one moment in the new series where they thought things may have been a bit extreme.
In the scene, Tony blows a raspberry on Lenny’s belly, with Way telling Digital Spy that it was “the only time I’ve heard Ricky saying this out loud”.
“In the middle of a take, I had my jumper up and he was blowing onto my belly like I was a toddler, and his head popped up and he went, ‘Have I gone too far? Is this okay?’” he recalled.
“I think it’s fine, we should carry on doing it and see what happens. You can always cut it out if it doesn’t work.”
Way continued: “I think that scene was written quite early on. The belly blowing not so much early on… it’s clearly a bugbear of Ricky’s, people making too much noise… But that just got weirder and weirder, that scene, and the more we rehearsed it, and it ended up with him doing that.”
In his two-star review of After Life season three, The Independent’s Louis Chilton wrote that the show was “bogged down by sentimentality” and failed to pluck at the heartstrings like it once did.
After Life is available on Netflix now.
