The definitive behind-the-scenes story of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple's wildest scene

[Ed. note: Spoilers follow for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.]

In the climactic ending of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) literally sings and dances for his life, desperate to shock and awe a gang of post-apocalyptic ravagers called “The Jimmies,” led by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), into submission. The scene is an incredible feat of filmmaking, a surrealistic battle between good and evil set to a head-banging 1980s classic that will probably prompt a round of applause from the audience if you see it in theaters. But it was almost very different in one extremely notable way: In the original script, Fiennes was fully nude.

“On the page, he was completely naked,” The Bone Temple’s editor, Jake Roberts, tells Polygon. “I don't know what was going through [screenwriter] Alex [Garland]'s mind at the time, but it was hard to believe. On the page there were considerably more full-frontal nude men.”

Lack of nudity aside, the story behind The Bone Temple’s epic finale is full of unexpected feats, creative problem-solving, freezing-cold night shoots, and last-minute script changes that came together to create one of the most impressive and unhinged cinematic moments in recent Hollywood history. To find out exactly how director Nia DaCosta and her crew pulled off the impossible, Polygon spoke to the people who made it happen, including DaCosta, Roberts, stunt supervisor Julian Spencer, choreographer Shelley Maxwell, and O’Connell — whose memory of the shoot is admittedly a bit fuzzy.

“It was overwhelming and I was caught up in it,” O’Connell recalls. “It was something to behold. All our reactions are just normal organic ones that Ralph was able to provoke from us because he took it there and smacked it out of the park.”

“I have to be involved in making this film”

Garland’s original script laid the groundwork for much of what appears onscreen.

“It was written into the script,” DaCosta says. “It was going to be ‘Number of the Beast.’ It was going to be Kelson doing this performance to pretend he was the devil, and in the middle of it, Samson was going to come out of the train. Those were the elements.”

Roberts recalls reading the script early on and immediately honing in on that scene.

“This is one of the scenes you read and you go, ‘OK, I have to be involved in making this film,’” he says. “But as much as there's an excitement attached to something that's such a big swing, part of you is also going, ‘How the hell do you pull this off?’ It was obvious that it was going to be quite a challenge to stage. Some things are a lot easier to write than perform and shoot.”

Garland’s script was extremely descriptive, with details about everything from Kelson’s outfit to the way he dances, though some of the specifics changed once production began. Once the director and her army of production designers, costume designers, VFX artists, plus a movement director, a choreographer, and a stunt team had a better understanding of what was possible, they got to work.

“We were just like, ‘OK, let's build this sequence,’” DaCosta says. “And so I came with some ideas, my production designers came with some ideas, and we just slowly built it over the months of prep. And then there was a day where we were like, ‘This is it. We did it.’”

“Can Ralph Sing?”

Another notable change from Garland’s script to the final cut? While Kelson essentially sings along to an Iron Maiden record in The Bone Temple, using an old turntable hooked up to a generator, the original version had Fiennes belting out the lyrics himself. This raised some concerns early on.

Roberts recalls: “One of my first questions to Nia when I met her was, ‘Can Ralph sing?' And she said, ‘Actually, I don't know.’” Ultimately, it didn’t matter, but Garland’s script apparently had Fiennes “singing, sort of high falsetto screaming, the vocal part.”

Fiennes still learned the lyrics of “The Number of the Beast,” according to stunt supervisor Julian Spencer, who worked closely with the actor and watched him sing it on set.

“He knows it inside out,” Spencer says. “He knew it beautifully. So it became second nature to him to mouth it or mime it during that whole sequence.”

At the end of the scene, the music stops ominously, setting up an exchange between Kelson (still pretending to be the devil) and the Jimmies. However, if you’ve ever used a record player before, you know that’s not how turntables work. Logically, the album should keep playing. It turns out Garland wrote in an explanation, and DaCosta even shot it, but Roberts made the decision to edit it out of the movie.

“There was a shot of Kelson pulling the cable — disconnecting the power supply before the next song played,” the editor says. “But I just thought it was more elegant and played better if you stayed with the Jimmies in the aftermath. It was an aesthetic decision.”

The song itself was also heavily edited to fit the narrative structure of the scene. Specifically, Roberts moved an instrumental from the middle of “The Number of the Beast” over to the end of the song to give Fiennes a chance to maneuver around the set.

“The solo that it ends with is actually in the middle, but structurally, you needed time for Kelson to be able to get down from the spire and then do the whole thing with the sparks, which meant you wanted to end with a big, strong instrumental thing and no dialogue, whereas the actual ‘The Number of the Beast’ track ends with a verse — if you want to be pedantic about it.”

“He's in incredibly great shape”

Ralph Fiennes does all his own stunts in the scene — with one exception.

“He's a very physical, very energetic man,” says stunt supervisor Julian Spencer. “He's very capable because he's in incredibly great shape.”

Spencer has been working on the franchise since the original 28 Days Later (2002) and even doubled for Fiennes in the past. He says he has total trust in the actor to pull off his stunts exactly as planned without ever pushing too far. Although, in this case, because of the way the scene was shot, there wasn’t really any other option.

“There was nothing there that I could do with a double without having to put a cut in and it would've ruined the effect anyway,” Spencer says.

Fiennes and the rest of the cast wore clothing treated with fire retardant liquids as a precaution, but otherwise, that’s the actors dancing and moshing inside a ring of actual fire.

The one exception is the moment where Kelson disappears into the shadows, only to reemerge wearing a head-to-toe fireproof suit and wielding a pair of fiery canisters connected by a rod. Flames and sparks shoot out of the canisters, creating an intimidating tower of fire that seems to consume Kelson entirely.

To pull this off, the crew found an Italian fire performer named Otto, a member of a group called I Piromanti that puts on a similar, medieval and fantasy-themed show.

“He does that all day, every day at shows and parties,” Spencer says. “It's quite unique.”

After finding him online, DaCosta decided to hire Otto and flew him (and his equipment) to the UK set, but there was a problem: His protective gear didn’t meet British safety standards.

“We had to rebuild everything from scratch,” Spencer says.

The suit was primarily made of leather, but the interior was covered in Nomex, a special fireproof fiber used by firefighters and racecar drivers. Under all that, Otto was “doused, soaking wet” to keep cool, Spencer explains.

Once shooting actually began, Otto could only perform for brief periods of time before needing a break to avoid overheating.

“We did that scene about three or four times, and I recall having to literally cool him down in between because he was getting incredibly hot,” Spencer says. “And as you can see, the effects from those red-hot embers were just phenomenal.”

Getting the timing right was also a challenge, as the flames shooting out of Otto’s canisters needed to line up with Iron Maiden’s guitar solo.

“When you're dealing with fire that you can't instruct, it changes the game,” says Shelley Maxwell, the film’s choreographer. The coals inside those canisters had to be heated to a specific temperature at just the right time to achieve that tower-of-fire effect. “So even though he does it brilliantly and it's amazing, it actually took a lot of painstaking logistics to get it right.”

"I can climb and sing at the same time"

When Maxwell joined the production, she had a lot of freedom to choreograph the scene. Garland’s script was light on details when it came to Fiennes’ satanic dance moves, instead just noting when Kelson enters the scene and his general movement across the set.

“With regards to how it's happening, that was on us to interpret,” Maxwell says.

With the opportunity to map out Fiennes’ dance as she saw fit, she sought out some unexpected influences.

“I looked at butoh, a contemporary Japanese art form of dance,” Maxwell says. “I looked at haka [ceremonial dances from Māori culture in New Zealand]. Things that would give a little bit of edge and ferocity to him, but also things that kind of had a quirky nature.”

Next, Maxwell met with Fiennes to discuss the performance. They watched videos of haka and butoh performances, and incorporated some of those elements into what came naturally for the actor.

“He is quite sinuous. He's very fit,” Maxwell says of Fiennes. “He had a kind of serpentine way of moving through the arms and the spine, which was really lovely.”

At the beginning of the scene, Kelson emerges from behind the spires of his ossuary, moving unnaturally with angular motions as he builds suspense for the Jimmies. Then, he leaps up onto a table in front of them and begins to put on a show.

“He's dancing on an altar, in essence,” Maxwell says. “So once he gets up at the top, we kind of channeled a little bit more ferocity. We also wanted to push the aerobic element of it. That's how we came up with him falling onto the floor, almost in a plank position.”

Getting off the altar and into the crowd of Jimmies was another tricky transition that Maxwell and Fiennes had to figure out. It was Fiennes who suggested that his character could leap from the table down onto the ground instead of simply climbing off. “He wanted to really be high-octane,” Maxwell says.

Moments later, Kelson is up in the air again, this time scaling the large central spire of his Bone Temple. Again, Fiennes personally pushed the performance to be as extreme as possible.

“He was just completely gung ho,” Maxwell says. “We wanted to get him up to the top, and Ralph was just like, ‘I can climb and sing at the same time.’”

Ahead of filming, DaCosta made the choice to keep Fiennes’ performance a secret from O’Connell and the rest of the Jimmies. Their reactions to the scene are genuine (at least for the first take), including their own dancing in response.

“Nia wanted it to feel like their first ever mosh pit, because this is just a new experience,” Maxwell says. “For the Jimmies, what do they know? They know death, they know killing, and they know this world with zombies that are just coming at them. But they've not tapped into a world of how to express and use your body freely. In that moment, they’re freed of all those inhibitions. It’s beautiful. It's what music does for human beings.”

“There was no way they were going to reshoot”

Shooting the scene took “two or three nights,” according to DaCosta, but the process wasn’t finished yet. Roberts rushed off to edit together a rough version that could prove Garland’s wild ideas actually translated onto film.

“I worked very hard and very quickly for everyone's peace of mind to make sure that we had it,” Roberts says. “They were still very much on the set. I think it was 36 hours after they shot it, the cut that is very close to what's in the movie was done.”

Not that there was necessarily anything else that could be done. At that point, the version of the scene DaCosta filmed needed to work. Thankfully, it did.

“There was no way they were going to reshoot. They didn't have the schedule or the time to start from scratch,” Roberts says.

Editing the scene together wasn’t quite as daunting as you might think. Because the entire thing was set to a musical performance with strict timing, the trick was simply lining up all the different shots for each beat of “The Number of the Beast” and then deciding what looked best.

“I treated it like a music video,” Roberts explains. “Say you have 25 shots. You sort of layer them one on top of each other on the timeline. As a first pass, you remove all the sort of rubbish bits where the camera's actually pointing at the floor or they've completely gone out of sync. And slowly by process of elimination, you get to the point where you have two or three choices for any particular point that might be really good and usable.”

The tough part was making sure the narrative was clear to the audience without making the entire scene feel repetitive. Roberts had to find the right balance between focusing on Fiennes’ performance while also occasionally cutting to O’Connell and the Jimmies’ reactions to that performance. There were also some pivotal moments, like Fiennes throwing down a torch to light the ring of fire, that needed to make the cut.

“It was a challenge to shoehorn all the things you wanted to get in that limited time,” Roberts says. “I've done films with live musical elements before, but never with quite such an onus on weaving a spell that had to work on both the audience and the characters within it.”

“It had to be this almost otherworldly sense of it.”

“We seem to have pulled it off”

The very last thing we see, before the camera cuts away to The Bone Temple’s final scene, is O’Connell crucified and hanging upside down on an inverted cross after his followers turn against him. It’s a striking visual, made all the more impressive when you know the story behind it.

“Jack was amazing,” stunt supervisor Julian Spencer says. “It was close to freezing that night. We had ice on the grass and we were asking an actor to come in virtually naked and hang upside down. We were standing around looking at him with our nice North Face jackets on, but he's there completely naked, basically.”

Maybe it’s for the best that O’Connell doesn’t recall much about those nights.

“It’s difficult to remember with it being night shoots,” the actor says. “They're quite maddening anyway.”

Clearly, all the sacrifice and hard work and freezing cold nights (either naked or not) were worth it when the end result looks so damn good.

“I'm just really pleased,” Roberts says. “Starting with Alex's insane imagination, and then from each step of the way — everyone stepped up. And thank God, we seem to have pulled it off.”