Minor spoilers for Fackham Hall are ahead! If you’d like to see this silly project on the 2025 movie schedule, you can catch it in theaters now.
As the critics’ reactions to Fackham Hall made clear, this Downton Abbey-like spoof movie is extremely silly, and it’s quite literally non-stop jokes for the film’s entire runtime. Now, some of these jokes are simply funny, some are punny, and others, to put it lightly, are NSFW. When I spoke to the cast, Thomasin McKenzie recalled one of those not-safe-for-work bits fondly, while also explaining why it left her “quite concerned.”
Like I said, much like all the best spoof movies – like The Naked Gun, which was rebooted on the 2025 movie schedule – Fackham Hall gives audiences non-stop jokes, and sometimes they’re moving so fast you can blink and miss them. So, with that in mind, I asked Thomasin McKenzie, who plays Rose Davenport, and Tom Felton, who plays Archibald, what their favorite gag or silly prop was. In response, the actress immediately brought up a gag involving a ripped piece of paper that she didn’t feel like she could fully explain during this interview for CinemaBlend:
I can't say it on camera, but when Eric rips a photo, and something…
Well, she might not have been able to say, but I can. The joke she’s referring to has to do with a photo that Eric (Ben Radcliffe), her character’s love interest, holds up. The image on the paper features Poppy (Emma Laird) on the left, and Rose on the right, and below the image are the words, “Peacock & Sleater.” In the movie, Eric rips the photo so he can keep the side with Rose on it.
However, that also means he keeps the letters right below it, too, and those letters spell out “cock eater,” which you can see piece together for yourself with the image above. It’s an absolutely hilarious and foul joke that had me cackling. It turns out Tom Felton found it hilarious too, as he explained:
Just classic. I was only there for half of the film shoot. I actually arrived, I think four weeks while you're into it. So a lot of the gags I'd read on the page, but I hadn't seen them. And that particular ripping of the [starts laughing]...
It truly is a hilarious bit, and like other great spoof movies that had me thinking “WTF,” this gag baffled me in the best way. It sounds like it got the Last Night in Soho actress, too.
After Felton laughed about the, for lack of a better term, “cock eater” bit, McKenzie told me that the joke concerned her a little bit, saying:
I have to say, I didn't know that they were writing that underneath my image. I didn't realize that that was what that was. So I was quite concerned when I realized. I was like, ‘Should I say something about this?’ I don't know how I feel about that being out in the world.
I have to admit, it is a very shocking joke in the movie that comes out of nowhere. So, I see where she’s coming from, especially since she didn’t realize it was there. However, as Felton said after that, it “paid off” because it is a super funny moment.
It’s shocking and unexpected, and it adds another creative, silly and naughty gag to a movie that is literally overflowing with them in the best way.
