For those of you you haven’t seen Psycho and don’t know the secret of the Bates Motel… well, for one, I hope you’ll rectify that immediately. Also, you might want to skip the rest of this post.
The rest of you know who killed Janet Leigh in that infamous shower scene, right? Well, turns out you might not: Steve North of Salon writes that Tony Perkins, the actor who played Norman Bates, admitted in an interview that not everything in that shot was as it seemed:
[I] asked if he would confirm the secret of “Psycho”: that during the filming of the horrific moment where Norman Bates, in drag, dispatches Miss Crane, Anthony Perkins himself was nowhere near the movie set.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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A slight pause for suspense … and then: It was true, he told me, with a sly smile on his face. And contrary to what I had read — that Perkins had to be in New York that week to rehearse a play and was therefore unavailable — the actor set the record straight, revealing that his non-appearance was quite intentional. “Hitchcock was very worried that the dual role and nature of Norman Bates would be exposed if I were to appear in that scene. I think it was the recognizability of my silhouette, which is rather slim and broad in the shoulder. That worried him.”
Perkins added that the director, in effect, broke his own long-standing rule with that decision. “He was outspokenly eager to not play any tricks on the audience in his films, to do anything that couldn’t be thought of as fair play, but in that instance, he in fact did. The guy he chose, from the ‘extra’ pool, was very unlike the silhouette of Norman Bates, as played by me. So in a way, Hitchcock didn’t exactly play by the book when he cast someone else in that scene.”
The one scene that, more than any other, cemented Hitchcock’s reputation as The Master of Suspense… turns out to be a fraud. Frankly, I don’t know that he should have been so concerned: I think people were slightly more distracted by the killing and whatnot. See if you can spot the difference:
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