It’s been a decade since Bridesmaids debuted in cinemas, and yet somehow it just seems like yesterday that Maye Rudolph was running across the street in a priceless wedding gown in a (failed) attempt to make it to the bathroom in time.
To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the comedy, director Paul Feig chatted with Insider, and revealed that a very “cringey” scene was cut from the film — yes, even more “cringey” apparently, than Melissa McCarthy emptying her bowels in the bridal salon sink.
As it turns out, that scene almost looked very different as Feig explained that the original script contained a sequence in which Matt Damon was chopping wood, sans shirt.
In the deleted scene, the girl gang — consisting of Rudolph and McCarthy along with screenwriter Kristen Wiig, Rose Byrne, Ellie Kemper and Wendi McLendon-Cove — go shopping for wedding gifts after eating at the Brazillian barbeque restaurant that makes them all ill.
“After that, we go into the dress shop. Annie (Wiig) goes into the dressing room to try on this really expensive dress, and suddenly she has a fantasy of what her life could be in this dress. It’s this romance feel, with her running through the woods, and Matt Damon is shirtless, chopping wood.”
According to the director, the reason for the scene not making the final cut was because he and Judd Apatow, who was the film’s producer, felt that there needed to be a consequence for Annie and that she needed to be humiliated in front of Helen and the other bridesmaids.
“So we came up with the food poisoning from being at a sh*tty restaurant,” he told Insider.
“But here’s the thing: Everyone remembers all the sh**ting and farting and throwing up, but the only reason that scene is funny is because Annie will not admit that she fu**ed up,” Feig elaborated.
“We always felt there needed to be a moment when Annie is just like, ‘I’m fine. That restaurant was great.’ Despite her friends sh**ting and puking in this very white place.”
If you were hoping to see the “deleted” scene of Damon in some sort of director’s cut edition of the movie to honour its ten years of existence, we regret to tell you that it doesn’t actually exist.
Feig revealed that they never ended up shooting the scene and assured us, “If we shot with Matt Damon, you would see that scene.”
Meanwhile, perennial heartthrob and eternal young person Paul Rudd, fared a little better than Damon — appearing in a deleted scene on the bonus features of the Bridesmaids DVD as Dave, who briefly dates Annie.