Glen Powell Says Sydney Sweeney Was “Coached” Into “Agitating” The Huntsman Spider Before It Bit Her: “Of Course That’s Going To Happen”

Sydney Sweeney recently revealed that she was bitten by a Huntsman spider while filming her brand new romantic comedy Anyone But You, but her co-star Glen Powell claims that she was encouraged to “jostle” the spider a bit before the incident occurred.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Powell recalled what it was like filming that fateful scene with Sweeney.

“The Huntsman spider, when she brings it out on her hand, it’s motionless,” Powell said. “And they’re like, ‘It looks fake, so jostle it a little bit.’ And I’m like, ‘Jostle it?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, you have to shake it to make it move.'”

He said that Sweeney was instructed to film insert shots “where she’s shaking this spider and agitating it,” though he expressed that he was confused why they were being instructed to agitate the spider.

Powell explained, “I was like, ‘Why are we agitating this real Huntsman spider?’ So that’s how it happened — they coached her into agitating this spider. I’m like, ‘Of course that’s going to happen.'”

“Sydney still has marks on her wrist from that Huntsman spider,” he said. “That was a legitimately scary moment for her on that set.”

Sweeney recently told Jimmy Fallon about that “terrible” experience on set, per EW.

“So, we’re filming, and then the thing just starts biting me,” she recalled on The Tonight Show earlier this month. “But we’re in the middle of the scene, and I’m supposed to be screaming, but then my screaming got a little serious. They thought I was making really serious dramatic choices in a rom-com. This is a disaster to any actor out there. It was terrible.”

She revealed that Powell was the only one to notice that something was wrong.

“No one cut. So I’m just standing there with this spider on my arm, biting me, and I’m screaming, and just everyone’s watching,” she said. “Glen was the only one who was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. I think this is a little real’ and we had to cut.”

Sweeney added, “I thought I was gonna die. Well, I was like, ‘It’s poisonous. I’m gonna die.’”

That proved to be a rather dramatic scene for the romantic comedy, but Powell also recently revealed that he “almost died” while filming the movie when he had to “rip” his clothes off for a scene while standing dangerously close to a cliff.

“Taking your clothes off on the side of a cliff in a hurry is not safe either,” he told Variety. “Nobody talks about that safety issue on set, where I almost died falling off a cliff taking my pants off too fast. But it’s a really fun scene, so it was all worth it.”

Anyone But You hits theaters today (Friday, Dec. 22).