Marlon Wayans only slept for two hours a night for 65 days while filming White Chicks
Marlon Wayans had a surprisingly gruelling schedule while filming cult-hit White Chicks, having revealed he only slept for two hours a night for 65 days when shooting the comedy.
The 2004 film stars Wayans and his brother Marlon as two FBI agents who go undercover as white women to try and solve a kidnapping case.
Their respective roles saw the pair don heavy prosthetics and makeup to transform into the movie’s titular ‘white chicks’, Tiffany and Brittany Wilson – a process that unsurprisingly took its time.
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Speaking to GQ earlier this year, Wayans said the film took its toll on him and his brother, saying they were spending 14 hours a day shooting.
This didn’t even include the time it took to apply and remove the makeup, he explained.
Wayans, 50, said: “That movie almost killed us.
“Seven hours of makeup. We’d work 14 hours after that. It takes an hour to get the makeup off. Shawn and I would get two hours of sleep for, like, 65 days, or 60 days.”
He continued: “And we still managed to hang out with our cast, and we still managed to write a series of books and write Thugaboo, which was an animated series.
“That was hard. It almost killed us. Make-up movies? Until they learn how to, like, digitally do it, special effect-wise...”
Shaking his head, he added: “That’s a lot of work. Everybody’s like, ‘Do a White Chicks 2!’
“I’m like, ‘F**k yourself! YOU do White Chicks 2, I’m doing black man movies.”
Wayans also admitted that he thought his brother Shawn was 'high' when he called him up and suggested the idea of White Chicks to him.
The Little Man star added: "He doesn’t smoke weed, but I think he was high on green tea."
"I think someone put weed in his green tea, be cause he called me up, and he was like, ‘Marlon, we should play two white girls.’
“It was like three in the morning. I was like, ‘What?’
“'We should play Paris and Nicky Hilton as detectives.’
“I said, ‘Bro, are you high?’”
Eventually, a confused Wayans hung up - only for his brother to show up at his house the next day with a copy of Rolling Stone, which had Paris and Nicky Hilton on the cover.
“He’s like, ‘We should play them'," Wayans continued.
“And then we watched Some Like it Hot, and I was like, ‘Yo, we can do this.’
“And then from there, we just started creating it, and before he knew it, we showed it to my brother and Keenan was like, ‘Mm, I like it, but you gotta do 26 more drafts.’
“He went on this long journey and he took it from the city and moved it from the Hamptons, and that’s when it all kind of started making sense.”
Despite the horrors of the makeup chair, Wayans has previously appeared open to the idea of a sequel.
Speaking to Variety last year, he said: "I think White Chicks 2 is necessary.
"I think we've tightened up so much that we need to loosen our ties a bit and laugh a little bit."
He added: "I don't think Hollywood understands what a juggernaut White Chicks 2 would be."
Wayans went on to say he and his brother already had plenty of ideas for a second helping.
"And the world just keeps giving us more," he said.
"White Chicks 2 is writing itself."
Topics: Celebrity, TV and Film, US News
Jess Hardiman