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.”
