Kripke and Bert attempt to leave the cow universe behind and travel to another universe without Stuart and Denise, only to wind up stuck in a seemingly never-ending free fall between realities. Filming those sequences involved extensive wire work — and, according to Brian Posehn, his considerably lighter co-star got the worst of it.
“This poor guy, because he weighs a lot less than me, was thrown around,” Posehn recalls, referring to John Ross Bowie, who himself confirms: “I was thrown around like a f**king ragdoll, Ryan!”
“It is fun and worthwhile to punish Kripke,” Bowie says. So while his airborne punishment “maybe had something to do with the actual physics of it, I think there was also something fun about just taking Kripke and yanking him up and down.”
Posehn, on the other hand, required a gentler approach. “Every time you see, like, a flood and there’s a cow being lifted to safety, that’s all they could really do with me,” he jokes. (“No, stop that!” Bowie interjects.)
Bowie’s experience was decidedly less gentle. At one point, he says, he was dropped 23 feet — and while he knew he was perfectly safe, his body didn’t necessarily get the message.
“When you’re just dropping like that and the floor is rushing at you, it’s very easy to forget that you’re perfectly safe,” he says. “And you get that real, like — not fight or flight, but like, ‘I’m just gonna die.’ There’s no fighting or flying. I’m just gonna — this is how I go.”
Still, Bowie says, “one of the joys of the show is that it’s these characters in unfamiliar situations. So having to maintain Kripke’s smart-ass attitude while being yanked through the air like a ragdoll was a fun acting challenge.”
The sequence was ultimately reshot several weeks later, with some new dialogue and jokes added — including Bert’s increasingly rambling story about a former geology teacher.
“Any opportunity I get to be — I love irritating people, like, in real life, too,” Posehn says. “I love getting to be like, ‘Oh, you don’t like what I just said? Well, how about this? I’m going to keep going. I’m not letting go of this.'”