Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

After Life: Ricky Gervais questioned if he’d gone ‘too far’ in season 3 scene, co-star reveals

Final season of Netflix series arrived on Friday

Isobel Lewis
Sunday 16 January 2022 10:13 GMT
Comments
After Life season 3 trailer

After Life star Tony Way has revealed the one scene in season three which led Ricky Gervais to question if he’d gone “too far”.

Gervais created and stars in the Netflix dark comedy, which follows a man called Tony dealing with the aftermath of the death of his wife.

While Tony uses his grief to punish the world by doing whatever he wants, Way – who plays photographer Lenny – has admitted that there was one moment in the new series where they thought things may have been a bit extreme.

In the scene, Tony blows a raspberry on Lenny’s belly, with Way telling Digital Spy that it was “the only time I’ve heard Ricky saying this out loud”.

“In the middle of a take, I had my jumper up and he was blowing onto my belly like I was a toddler, and his head popped up and he went, ‘Have I gone too far? Is this okay?’” he recalled.

“I think it’s fine, we should carry on doing it and see what happens. You can always cut it out if it doesn’t work.”

Way continued: “I think that scene was written quite early on. The belly blowing not so much early on… it’s clearly a bugbear of Ricky’s, people making too much noise… But that just got weirder and weirder, that scene, and the more we rehearsed it, and it ended up with him doing that.”

In his two-star review of After Life season three, The Independent’s Louis Chilton wrote that the show was “bogged down by sentimentality” and failed to pluck at the heartstrings like it once did.

After Life is available on Netflix now.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in