No matter how you’ve experienced Matilda, chances are one moment is forever seared into your brain: when the wicked Miss Trunchbull forces Bruce to eat an entire chocolate cake. Sounds delicious, right? Not so fast. What begins as a glorious, giddy childhood fantasy quickly spirals into ooey-gooey horror.
“Roald Dahl’s good at remembering what it feels like to be a kid — all the great things and all the not-so-great things,”director Matthew Warchus tells Tudum. “So when he wrote [the Bruce scene], he would’ve known that adults and children would latch onto that and find it really appealing and off-putting in equal measure.”
That juxtaposition of the delectable and the disgusting is part of what made adapting the chocolate cake scene in the new Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical so much fun for Warchus. “I just think it’s such a surprising and grotesque and fantastical thing to see a kid tackling a chocolate cake that’s about the same size as him,” Warchus says. “I think part of it is horrible and torture as Trunchbull intended. And part of it, as a kid, you’re thinking, ‘Wow. I wouldn’t mind some of that chocolate cake myself.’ It’s iconic.”
This indelible scene, however, wasn’t without its challenges. In the Matilda stage musical, nine children perform the Bruce song, and it all takes place within the classroom setting. But Warchus wanted to make it bigger and bolder for his film (in which Charlie Hodson-Prior plays Bruce). “We moved it to the canteen so there would be more kids there,” Warchus says. “But in a film, you don’t really want to stay in the same place for too long. You want to move to a different location if possible because film needs constantly changing imagery.”
As a result, Warchus came up with what he calls a “triple revolve,” where, he says, “everything was moving — the tables, the kids and everything in this fantastical sequence — without actually going somewhere else. We’d go into a completely different dimension.”
The result is a crazy, colorful phantasmagoria of fudge that heightens the drama of Bruce stuffing his face. Like Roald Dahl’s novel, it makes you both repulsed and, yes, a bit hungry.
Oddly enough, it turns out that the ultimate beneficiary of the chocolate cake scene wasn’t Bruce or Warchus or anyone else involved with the production. Nope, it was Warchus’ youngest son. “It was his birthday on the last day that we shot that sequence,” says the director, “so I took home the third layer of the cake. It took us two weeks to eat just that layer alone.”
