Naked Blue ‘Watchmen’ Actor Tom Mison: ‘That Is Not My Penis’
Spoiler alert: the following story contains spoilers for Watchmen's second episode.
Episode 2 of Watchmen saw the reenactment of Doctor Manhattan’s origin story.
The reenactment featured actor Tom Mison, who descended naked from the rafters.
Mison says the scene made use of a “willy double.”
Last night’s episode of HBO’s Watchmen featured a reenactment of the Doctor Manhattan’s birth, meaning one actor, painted in blue, descending from the rafters, bore all for the audience; the graphic novel’s powerful superhero is mostly depicted naked. The actor who plays Mr. Philips, the robotic butler of Jeremy Irons’ mysterious character, also plays Manhattan in the fake stage performance. He also gets naked. We think.
In an interview with TVLine, Mison began by clarifying: “That is not my penis.” When Mison seemingly descends in his blue body paint, the audience is actually seeing a body double for the actor. “I had to tell all of my neighbors,” Mison went on. “I live near old people, and just in case they happen to watch, I just had to let everyone know that they can look me in the eye.”
Mison apparently had a choice in his body double. “The process of choosing a willy double was by far the weirdest. I’ve never had so many, well, any pictures sent to me.” While Mison wasn’t in a room looking at a lineup—“like The Usual Suspects,” he joked—he was sorting through pictures of potential private doubles. “They kept emailing me more and more, pictures of these poor boys who just have to take pictures of themselves in their bedrooms. And I had to sift through. No, no, no. I ended up with a boy called Fergal. Lovely chap.”
Like Greek statues of perfect physique, Doctor Manhattan is often depicted with a similarly-sized penis in the graphic novels. The aesthetic preference of penis size was quite different in Ancient Greece, where smaller lengths indicated moderation and control over one’s more base, animalistic urges. Large penises were actually mocked. Doctor Manhattan’s Greek-like physique imitates a similar kind of sexual control. In fact, we see Doctor Manhtattan bored by sexual intimacy. In one scene, he duplicates himself during sex so that he can both please his partner and also get some work done. That he has a statue-like physique only reinforces his growing apathy.
So yes, his penis isn’t what we now consider powerful or dominant. But that’s actually the point.
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