Betty Gilpin Opens Up About Prosthetics In Office Romance Birth Scene

This article contains spoilers for the Netflix film Office Romance.

This is perhaps reflected in some of the more adult humour showcased in Office Romance – and one graphic scene in particular.

Emmy nominee Betty Gilpin plays Sydney Bloom, Jennifer Lopez’s character’s right-hand woman, in the new Netflix comedy.

When we first meet Sydney, she’s already around nine months pregnant, and as the story progresses, she eventually gives birth right there in the office – with viewers getting to see pretty much all of it.

Suffice to say, this was achieved with the use of prosthetics, which she opened up about during a new interview with Variety.

“Honestly, I was pretty freaked out when I first saw the prosthetic vagina,” she recalled.

“I had a nervous breakdown and then I was like, ‘Oh, but I’ll be holding the ultimate working mom’s hand, Jennifer Lopez, so what could go wrong?’.”

Betty explained that there were more prosthetics used for the sequence than you might have realised, claiming: “My real legs were below a table, [I had] fake prosthetic legs, and then a puppeteer was standing at my real legs pushing an animatronic baby out of my prosthetic vagina.”

“It was insane,” she remarked.

Betty went on to share that the scene was originally even more detailed than what made it into the finished film.

She added: “The saddest part was when the scene was over and everybody but the puppeteers stayed in the room because the only way to reset was to go under and pull the fake placenta — I think the placenta is not in the movie anymore – but reach up through the prosthetic vagina that I am still zipped into, pull the placenta back and take the umbilical cord and pull it back and then pull the baby back through, and then it was time to do it again.”

Office Romance stars Jennifer Lopez and Brett Goldstein as the CEO of an airline and the head of its legal department, who fall in love despite the company’s strict rules about workplace relationships.

While critically it hasn’t exactly gone down a storm (it currently holds a 51% score on Rotten Tomatoes while on Letterboxd, users have ranked it 2.6 stars), it has clearly gone down well with Netflix users, as it’s the platform’s number one film at the time of writing.