How Dead Ringers created those visceral childbirth scenes

Rachel Weisz plays twin gynecologists on Dead Ringers, and the new Amazon Prime Video series does not shy away from what that job entails. Within the first 10 minutes of the first episode, viewers are treated to a montage of Drs. Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played by Weisz) delivering babies upon babies. Some come through the birth canal, some have to be surgically cut out of their mothers' stomachs, but all of them are covered in blood and viscera.

This is a change from the original Dead Ringers. In director David Cronenberg's 1988 film, the Mantle twins (played by Jeremy Irons) are still gynecologists, but we hardly see them actually deliver babies. The film is more concerned with how those Mantles use their position to seduce and manipulate the women under their care. Weisz's Mantles, by contrast, actually are invested in helping their patients.

Weisz credits showrunner Alice Birch and director Sean Durkin with crafting the show's visual approach to childbirth. Birch, in turn, shouts out both the show's technicians and expert advisers.

"I've not seen that on screen before, so it felt really important," Birch tells EW about depicting the reality of childbirth. "It was a huge team effort. We had an incredible prosthetics team who made both prosthetic babies and prosthetic body parts."

"We also had experts on hand all the time to make sure that what we were doing looked as accurate as possible," she continues, "so that when we were doing that incision on a C-section, we got exactly the right layer of fat on the belly, and that the iodine was spreading in the right way. So it was creative, but also very, very technical."

It fell to Weisz, though, to actually cut through those prosthetic stomachs. It doesn't sound easy.

"It was cuttable," Weisz explains. "There were blood bags underneath, which we then had to clean up afterward. I guess there was a finite amount of takes that we could have, but we had a robust amount of bellies. The challenge in the emergency C-section was learning to cut it while also delivering dialogue. For them, that's what they do all day. Like us talking right now, we're doing our jobs, and so they can just do their jobs and chat. But that was a learning curve for me, learning to deliver a baby while also cracking jokes for your sister."

All episodes of Dead Ringers are streaming now on Prime Video.

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