In Thor, Chris Hemsworth wields a mighty hammer, but in the new reboot of Vacation, he’s swinging something considerably more obscene (but just as potent): a giant dick. The member in question comes into play at the movie’s midpoint, when our hero Rusty (Ed Helms) makes a pit stop to visit his sister (Leslie Mann) and her well-equipped husband (Hemsworth), the latter of whom carries on half-nude, almost oblivious to the size of his own package. Was it, uh, hard to shoot that scene? We asked writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein how it came together.

First, they had to choose the right prosthetic. “It was definitely one of the more surreal aspects of preparing for this movie,” Goldstein admitted. “There was a hapless stand-in who first came in when we were looking at the possibilities, and he’d put it on and have to show all the different options to us.”



“It was the opposite of funny, because you felt so bad for this poor stand-in,” said Daley. “You knew that he didn’t particularly want to to be doing this, and that the wardrobe people in charge of the dick were also very uncomfortable with the situation. And then we tried it out on Chris, and it became awkward, but in a funny way. He was all for it, and ready to do it.”



By that time, the filmmakers had narrowed the potential penises down to two, though, they still had yet to make a decision on its ultimate size. “The morning we shot that sequence, we went into another room in the house we were shooting in, and Chris modeled the eight-inch and the ten-inch options for us,” said Daley. The eight-incher was quickly vetoed: “As big as it would seem, it did not look that big on him. I think it was just because Chris is such a big, hulking dude.”



“He makes the normal-size penis look small,” Goldstein concurred.



Still, other dick issues presented themselves almost immediately. “Chris was playing with it, and handling it,” said Daley, “and we found that there was this metal rod in it that was supposed to make it bendable. The problem was whatever shape you bent it into, it would stay in — which is not like a real dick! So we took the rod out, which allowed it to be more flaccid, but obviously just as huge.”



Daley and Goldstein will have to contend with special effects of a different sort over the next few months, as they’ve been drafted to write Marvel’s new Spider-Man reboot. That’s still in the early stages, as Goldstein says they’re going in to Marvel this weekend to look at footage of Tom Holland’s cameo as Peter Parker in Captain America: Civil War. “We hear good things,” he said. “We might even get to look at the Spidey suit, which is exciting.” Forget any rumored cast lists that have been floating around the web, however: “We’ve discussed certain characters,” said Daley, “but nothing is certain yet, for sure.”