What Sam Rockwell Really Spit On Tom Hanks' Face In The Green Mile
The 1999 Frank Darabont film "The Green Mile" has its fair share of truly despicable characters, but the grossest of them all has to be Sam Rockwell's "Wild Bill" Wharton, who assaults and abuses both corrections officers and his fellow inmates with abandon. In the film, based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King, Wild Bill is an inmate who comes to the death row facility where guard Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) works and makes life hell for everyone there, and Rockwell really put his all into it, portraying one of cinema's biggest slimeballs. He uses racist slurs, urinates on a guard's shoes, and spits a whole bunch of Moon Pie chocolate filling all over another guard. He also spits right in Paul's face, and it's nasty.
In a video for GQ where he breaks down his most iconic roles, Rockwell shares the secrets behind what was in his onscreen spit and explains how the film's creatives put together some of those disgusting moments.
The spit was made of egg whites and chocolate
In the video, Rockwell reveals that the movie's crew used some creative editing to get the shots of his character spitting in both Hanks and David Morse's guard character Brutus' face:
"I don't know if I actually spit, but [Tom Hanks] was ready to take it. He was cool with it. Yeah, we used egg whites for the drool, and then we had some chocolate paste. We had to squirt in a turkey baster in his face. And Oscar-winning makeup artist, Lois Burwell, had to paint zits on my buttocks and everywhere else, liver spots on my face, and devil's in the details. You know, you really — the details really add up to a character. It creates a full blown three-dimensional person, kind of a human pus ball."
The chocolate paste was likely for the Moon Pie spewed at Morse's face, but the big hunk of spit that he launches onto Hanks's face certainly looks like it could be egg white. Gross. Wild Bill is a kind of ridiculous monster of a character that somehow works because of the level of detail put into him, along with Rockwell's commitment to selling him as a real human being, even if he is a "pus ball."
Bringing a human pus ball to life
There are some pretty contemptible characters in "The Green Mile," like sadistic guard Percy (Doug Hutchison), who puts a dry sponge in the place of a wet one during an execution by electricity in the film's most disturbing scene, but Bill really stands out as an absolute villain. He's a hateful beast of a man who seems intent only on making others suffer, and Rockwell imbues him with a kind of pure hatred that feels all too real. It provides a good contrast to the film's more empathetic and moral characters, like Paul and Michael Clark Duncan's wrongfully accused prisoner John Coffey. John seems too good for this world, with supernatural healing abilities and a sweet demeanor despite his impressive size, while Paul is doing his best to be a good man in a frequently corrupt system. Giving them true villains to contend with helps highlight their goodness and grants greater weight to the movie's ending, in which John seeks his execution anyway despite Paul wanting to set him free.
Darabont seems to really understand what makes King's novels work, having directed "The Shawshank Redemption," "The Green Mile," and "The Mist," and a big part of that is understanding that King's characters tend to be drawn in big, bold strokes, with intense characteristics. Bill is a true-blue King villain, and Rockwell (and his nasty egg white spittle) brought him to life perfectly.