Kelly Clarkson asks Benicio del Toro if bathtub scene was ‘hard’

Kelly Clarkson wants y’all to get your minds out of the gutter.

An interview with Benicio del Toro on the latest episode of Clarkson’s eponymous talk show went hilariously off the rails when she asked the Oscar winner if continuity was, ahem, “real hard in that area” for his bathtub scene in The Phoenician Scheme… and the studio audience reacted exactly the way you’d expect.

“You get so into trying to figure out the riddle of getting it right that you just forget [you’re in the bathtub], and then the next day you’re all crinkly like a prune,” del Toro told Clarkson of the scene in question.

“How do you not look like a prune by hour one?” Clarkson wanted to know.

“You get a good hair and makeup person to take care of it,” del Toro told her, to which Clarkson remarked that she “prunes up like 20 minutes in” the water. “Yeah, continuity… must have been real hard in that area, yes,” she added.

As del Toro and the audience immediately started to laugh, Clarkson realized the accidental innuendo. “No, no, no!” she shouted, standing up to comically chastise the audience. “I did not mean… I am way too tired,” she said with a laugh.

“I did not even mean that, I meant you’re pruny. Nasty people. No, no, that’s not on me. Usually it is,” she added, as the audience continued to laugh at her expense.

Del Toro previously opened up to Entertainment Weekly about the bathtub scene, which serves as the opening credits scene to the new Wes Anderson film. In the scene, Zsa-zsa Korda (del Toro) is shown recovering after his latest assassination attempt. Shot in slow motion from overhead, the sequence features a bandaged and bloodied Korda eating, reading, and smoking in his bath as assorted nurses and household staff flit around him as if in a ballet.

Initially del Toro, who had to sit in the tub for an estimated eight hours, had his doubts. To achieve the scene’s hypnotic slow-motion effect, Anderson asked his actors to move unnaturally fast, leading del Toro to question whether the technique would translate on screen. “So if I’m smoking, I got to smoke fast. If I eat, I got to eat fast,” the actor recalled. “So I said [to Anderson], ‘What? I mean, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? If you’re doing it in slow motion, we might as well shoot it normal.’ And he said, ‘No, no, no, it’s going to be different.’ I said, ‘Okay.'”

Benicio Del Toro and Kelly Clarkson on ‘The Kelly Clarkson Show’.

Weiss Eubanks/NBCUniversal

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In the end, the choreography paid off. Del Toro explained, “When I saw it, it’s just like, it is different than just shooting at a normal speed. It is different. It has this quality that is unique — it’s kind of like a musical in a way, without dancing, let’s put it that way. But the movement and the way it is, it’s a beauty.”

He added, “That’s one of those things that you think you’ve figured it all out. And here I am doing another movie with a great director, and he’s telling me to do this, and I go home, and I’m glad I was a prune for about five days after that sequence. It’s just really a cool sequence.”

The Phoenician Scheme is in theaters now. Watch Clarkson’s unintended double entendre above.