Twenty minutes into the indie movie “Butter,” one of the main characters, played by “Modern Family” star Ty Burrell, is seen having wild, frantic sex with a stripper in the front seat of his car. The scene has the same farcical flavor as the hit primetime comedy — at one point, Burrell’s, er, companion, Olivia Wilde, barks instructions at him like an Army sergeant — but it’s a departure from the G-rated behavior of Burrell’s well-intentioned, doofussy TV persona, Phil Dunphy.
“Yeah, maybe it’s raised a few eyebrows,” says Burrell, who describes Wilde as “a screamer.” “It was filmed in the parking lot of an actual strip club in Shreveport, La. The whole place just reeked so terribly of shame.”
Burrell’s co-star Jennifer Garner, who plays his scheming wife, also got to shoot a raunchy sequence in “Butter,” which is now in theaters and on cable on-demand systems. Again, it is somewhat removed from her regular, more wholesome image.
“They put a boom [microphone] in our faces and got us to simulate these sex sounds,” recalls Garner, of the scene in which she and Hugh Jackman hook up in a car showroom. “They were like, ‘Turn it up, dial it up!’ It was Hugh’s first day on the movie, which made it all the more crazy and absurd!”
The stars had a whale of a time making the political satire, which lampoons ultra-conservative Tea Party types in the Midwest.
Garner plays Laura Pickler, a mash-up of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann (with a touch of Hillary Clinton), who’ll stop at nothing to beat a cute young prodigy in the Iowa State Fair’s storied butter-carving competition.
To prepare for their roles, Garner and Burrell were tutored by a top food artist.
“He makes a living out of sculpting all kinds of foods: cheese, chocolate and butter,” says Garner, whose character creates a jaw-dropping interpretation of the assassination of JFK. “But he minced no words and told us to stick with our day jobs.”
Burrell blames the conditions.
“They usually do the carving in a refrigerated area, but we were in a Hilton ballroom,” he says. “I was trying to do a sculpture of my hand. We were against a ticking clock because within an hour, it just looked like I was working on something which belonged on top of a giant English muffin.”