Michael Irby Explains How The Barry Team Pulled Off That Sandy Scene

This article contains spoilers for the latest episode of "Barry."

This week's episode of "Barry" was a heartbreaker. More specifically, the already super-dark show asked us to trade our tension for tears over the course of a half-hour that saw once-winsome criminal NoHo Hank's (Anthony Carrigan) relationship with his lover Cristobal (Michael Irby) fall to pieces. By the episode's end, Cristobal was dead on the ground and Hank was shattered and resigned at once.

Before the pair's bloody breakup, though, they endured another harrowing moment, during which Hank's attempt to kill his underlings in one fell swoop almost took Cristobal down with them. In an interview with Variety, Irby debriefed about that harrowing silo sequence, in which his character is briefly entirely buried under pounds upon pounds of desert sand. It turns out the actor really did get buried, but did so safely thanks to some good, old-fashioned movie magic.

Irby tells Variety that the sandy set was built on a soundstage in Culver City, but had an incredible sense of scale. "It was the hugest thing I've ever seen," he said, calling the set "incredible." Irby first stepped onto the silo set for a safety rehearsal the day before shooting where he accidentally took a mouthful of the edible fake sand. "It was this massive silo and the walls could come in and out of it," Irby said of the set. "The actual sand was ground corn husk, so it was much lighter than real sand."

The actor explained that he made sure to breathe with his mouth closed after getting a mouthful of husks during his first attempt to enter the pit. "The first time I'm just going to go for it, I get in there and feel the space and I took [in] a mouthful of this corn husk," he recalled. He admitted that, since he's not claustrophobic, he found the filming process "cool," but that he recognized that "it was a pretty traumatic scene, as much as it comes off a little funny with the physical aspects." The final edit certainly bears this out; as someone who grew up in a farming family and heard horror stories about silo-related deaths, I was grimacing my way through the whole sequence.

Irby noted that for audiences, the scene takes a sudden turn, as the fun-loving criminals are totally surprised by the twist of fate. "It's a very high celebratory moment that wags the dog on us," he said. "We're all looking one way, and then all of a sudden the ground falls out from beneath us." To achieve the effect of Cristobal looking mostly buried, Irby described a contraption that sounds as much like a magic trick as a practical effect set piece. "There was a little box they had built at the bottom of this sand, and it had a very thick, heavy rubber wetsuit," he said. "They had cut five or six slits in it, so the sand would stay on top, but when I got my legs through there, I could kind of reverse birth and go back into the womb."

The box apparently somehow provided an air pocket from Irby's waist upward, so he could breathe underneath the fake sand despite it being pitch black. To reach for Irby, Carrigan apparently had to stick his hand through the rubber to grab the actor. Irby estimated he had to endure the under-sand sequence about 15 times, but doesn't sound at all bothered by the experience. "I had a little bit of space to stand on underneath," he explained, "so when I stood up full you saw the upper half of my body and I was standing on this platform right beneath me and then [Carrigan] pulled me out there."

The actor who portrayed Bolivian mob boss Cristobal for four seasons on "Barry" sounds like he was pretty game for the complex, technical stunt, but it also sounds like there's one snack he might have had his fill of for the time being. When asked about the flavor of the fake sand, the actor admitted: "It tastes like the bottom of a bag of Corn Nuts."

"Barry" airs on HBO and HBO Max on Sundays at 10 p.m. ET.