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‘A Christmas Story’ Star Says Crew Gave Him Real Chewing Tobacco: ‘They Really Screwed Up’

   DailyWire.com
Actor Peter Billingsley attends the Academy Celebrates "A Christmas Story" 35TH Anniversary at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, in Beverly Hills, California, on December 10, 2018.
VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images

Actor-turned-producer Peter Billingsley, who will forever be immortalized as Ralphie in “A Christmas Story,” opened up about a nasty little mistake that occurred while filming the movie back in the early 1980s.

During an interview on the podcast “That Scene With Dan Patrick,” Billingsley explained that the prop master mistakenly gave him real chewing tobacco in the scene where he daydreams about defending his family from a pack of burglars with his much-coveted Red Ryder BB gun. Given that Billingsley was just 12 years old at the time, he quickly became sick to the point of vomiting.

“Well, they totally screwed up, Dan,” Billingsley said. “The scene says he’s dressed as a sheriff. So you put the costume on. And a line in the script says he’s chewing tobacco. So, sure enough, the prop man, who’s responsible for that – anything the actor touches is the prop man’s department – he comes up to me and he’s got this pouch and it says Red Man on it, and he flips it open – I swear to God, I don’t know the difference – I said, ‘What do I do with this?’ He says, ‘Here, jam it down in here.’ He says, ‘Don’t swallow, just spit.’”

“So, I do it, we get ready to go, and about 15 minutes in, the world starts tilting,” he continued, as reported by Fox News. “I start sweating. My stomach starts hurting, and I start throwing up.”

Immediately, director Bob Clark yelled cut and asked “What the hell is going on?” according to Billingsley.

“And the prop man says, ‘Oh, I gave him Red Man, you know.’” said Billingsley. “Bob says, ‘What are you doing? He’s 12 years old!’”

The scene was shut down until Billingsley recovered and the chewing tobacco was replaced with crushed raisins that made his spit brown.

“So we shut it down, I go and lay on the couch in the living room of the set for about 40 minutes until I can get this s*** out of my system,” he said. “Then they did what they should have done. Someone had the good idea – they took a bunch of raisins, squished them together, and then stuck that in my mouth, and I had brown spit. Can you imagine? It was a very different time then. He just gave me straight-up, whole-cut-leaf Red Man.”

Though “A Christmas Story” has become a classic, the movie has been met with charges of racism over the past decade over the movies concluding scene in a Chinese restaurant. In the scene, a group of waiters botch their rendition of “Deck the Halls” because of their thick, stereotypical Asian accents. The scene became so controversial that 2017’s “A Christmas Story Live” did away with the joke entirely.

“The most noticeable update comes toward the end of the production, during the Chinese-restaurant scene when a group of Asian waiters sing ‘Deck the Halls’ for Ralphie and his family on Christmas Day,” reported Vulture at the time. “The original film depicted the waiters as performing the song with stereotypical mispronunciation, singing the song’s refrain as ‘Fa ra ra ra ra’ instead of ‘Fa la la la la.’ But in this version, the quintet — in real life, the a cappella group Filharmonic — performs the classic carol flawlessly.”

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