‘Wicked’ star Jonathan Bailey used costume ‘plumbing’ because he was so hot

The Wicked Witch isn’t the only one doing some melting in the Wicked film adaptation— star Jonathan Bailey was so hot during his epic “Dancing Through Life” number he had to turn to some eyebrow-raising methods to say cool.

Bailey talks about his hilarious setup in Entertainment Weekly‘s “It Takes a Village” video series, in which he, director Jon M. Chu, cinematographer Alice Brooks, hair and makeup designer Frances Hannon, costume designer Paul Tazewell, visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman, editor Myron Kerstein, and choreographer Christopher Scott come together to reveal how they pulled off the eye-popping scene.

“It was so hot in this leather, two-piece leather, I think it was velvet trousers,” Bailey says of his costume. “I had plumbing underneath. I plugged myself into an ice-cold — I carried a little bag around full of slushy — and it got pumped through.”

“I thought you had pee in there,” Chu jokes. “That was not my catheter, no,” Bailey replies with a laugh. Jokes aside, Chu recalls finding his star in a rough place in between takes.

“I remember coming over to you, and you had the machine all connected, and I was like, ‘Great job, great job!’ And you’re like, ‘I just need to get through this, Jon,'” Chu says. The In the Heights director says he decided to leave his star alone, and in that moment, really empathized with him since he had been a mascot in high school.

The fan-favorite number “Dancing Through Life” serves as Bailey’s character Fiyero’s major introduction to the students of Shiz, where he tells his fellow pupils his blunt views on school — which he finds pointless — and instead encourages them to live the “unexamined life.”

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The number is huge and immediately stands out as a high point of the film, featuring a massive set — Brooks estimated it came in at almost 180 feet long by 145 feet wide and went all the way up to the roof in the center, which is 45 feet high — with three giant, rotating bookshelves for the actors, dancers, and parkour artists to flip and spin off of.

An estimated 350 people (and 2,000 cans of hairspray!) were used on set to make it all happen — and it was a daunting task because, as Brooks puts it, “We knew if ‘Dancing Through Life’ works, we have our movie.”

But it was a massive undertaking not just because of the importance of the scene itself but because of how risky it could be as well. “It’s very dangerous, actually, the amount of engineering and people that had to go into securing this. I mean, insurance alone really didn’t want us to do this,“ Chu admits.

In fact, Scott wasn’t sure they’d let their star in the rotating bookcase set piece, affectionately referred to as the tornado wheel, at all during the scene. “I wasn’t sure they were gonna allow Jonathan Bailey in the tornado wheel because of safety, which makes sense because, you know, he needs to carry on because we can’t injure our Fiyero.”

Watch the video above for more behind-the-scenes secrets on the making of “Dancing Through Life.” Wicked, also starring Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Marissa Bode, Ethan Slater, Peter Dinklage, and more, is now in theaters.