When the Cameras Stopped, the Pain Didn’t
Some films are shot. Good Boy (2025) was endured.
What looked like a slick psychological thriller on screen was, behind the camera, a chaotic experiment in endurance, emotion, and identity. From intense character immersion to physical illness and on-set breakdowns, the cast and crew didn’t just tell a story about obedience and pain—they lived it.
The Story of Obedience and Isolation
Directed by Ari Aster, Good Boy tells the story of Eli Barker (Jacob Elordi), a man trapped in an experimental “obedience therapy” program designed by a wealthy recluse. Treated like a human pet—fed, trained, and punished—Eli’s sense of humanity begins to unravel.
His world collides with Clara (Anya Taylor-Joy), a journalist investigating the program, whose curiosity soon turns into obsession. As she gets entangled in the psychological web, both characters face a frightening question: Is obedience love, or just control disguised as care?
The film’s haunting minimalism, cold tones, and deliberate silences made audiences shiver—but those emotions were born from very real discomfort on set.
Jacob Elordi’s Descent: Becoming the “Good Boy”
Jacob Elordi’s transformation into Eli wasn’t just physical—it was spiritual self-destruction.
To portray a man who’s stripped of power, Elordi isolated himself for weeks before shooting began. He avoided mirrors, cut contact with friends, and reportedly stayed in a bare apartment with minimal furniture to “unlearn comfort.”
During filming, he followed a diet similar to his character’s—a controlled, protein-restricted meal plan that left him weak. The production’s remote English countryside setting, often cold and damp, only heightened the experience.
Crew members recall him crawling on all fours during rehearsals, practicing obedience sequences for hours without direction. One assistant camera operator said,
“We stopped seeing Jacob after the second week. It was Eli who came to set every day.”
By the third act’s emotionally brutal scenes, Elordi had lost nearly 7 kilos and suffered minor back injuries from repeated takes. But he refused body doubles, insisting that “the exhaustion had to look real.”
Anya Taylor-Joy: Carrying the Weight of Witness
For Anya Taylor-Joy, the challenge wasn’t physical—it was psychological fatigue.
Her character, Clara, begins as a detached journalist but gradually becomes emotionally complicit in Eli’s suffering. To capture that moral decay, Anya spent long hours in rehearsals discussing voyeurism, guilt, and manipulation with Aster.
But the deeper she went, the more it affected her off-screen. Crew members described moments when she stayed quiet between takes, sitting alone in corners, almost unable to shake off Clara’s numbness.
In an interview later, she said,
“It’s terrifying when you start to question if you’re still you after playing someone who watches suffering so closely.”
During one particularly heavy scene—where Clara records Eli’s breakdown—Anya broke down for real. She later revealed that she wasn’t acting at all in that take; she was genuinely overwhelmed by what she was witnessing. The director kept that shot in the final cut.
Ari Aster’s Vision Meets Reality
Director Ari Aster is known for pushing emotional boundaries, but Good Boy tested even his limits.
The film had a modest budget of around $25 million—tight for its artistic ambition. Most of it went into location control, set design, and psychological consultants hired to ensure safe portrayal of behavioral trauma.
The production took place in isolated regions of northern England, where unpredictable weather halted filming multiple times. Freezing winds caused equipment failures, and delays pushed the crew into night shifts lasting up to 14 hours.
Producers nearly pulled the plug twice after insurance costs soared due to hazardous conditions. Aster, however, refused to move the shoot indoors, believing the cold environment mirrored the characters’ emotional state.
“The discomfort had to be visible,” he said. “If the actors weren’t feeling it, the film would lie.”
That commitment created one of the most atmospheric movies of the decade—but at the cost of morale and health.
Emotional Collisions: Behind the Scenes
Elordi’s demanding performance started to affect the boundary between acting, and living for the duration of the film.
Worker reports show real worry for Elordi, who spent the most of the time without heat and additional rest. One time, during the kennel scenes, he spent hours after the filming ended, asking the “silence team” to “let him feel the silence.”
A medic later on reported to the team that he was borderline dehydrated by the fifth week. Crew members started implementing rest days after Elordi fainted briefly between some of the seems.
For Anya, the challenge was the contrary: keeping the distance. Reportedly, she asked for fewer breaks between takes. She was concerned that if she had too much time to “feel normal,” she would lose Clara’s emotional tension.
Even Aster admitted to having doubts during.
Controversies and Creative Clashes
Good Boy’s extreme tactics were bound to attract attention. Early reports on the set’s emotional distress were fed to tabloids calling the production “a psychological experiment in film’s clothing.”
Aster’s critics claimed that he was taking the emotional boundaries of the actors too far. In defense, both Elordi and Taylor-Joy came to the director’s defense. Elordi remarked:
Still, during the editing phase, it was reported that the tension escalated. Studio executives wanted to cut out the more disturbing parts to make a more mainstream version for release, but Aster was adamant that he wanted the disturbing parts to Raw edits. This standoff pushed the film’s release back for almost three months, and Aster was rumored to have nearly walked out due to the compromise that was eventually reached.
Crew Sacrifices and Unseen Labor
The difficulty reached beyond the outer edges of the galaxy. The technical crew worked under extreme duress and isolation; some of them developed pneumonia and needed to interrupt the shooting. Rigging the cameras left many crew members woozy and faint and resulted in minor injuries.
Later in documentation ‘shedding light’ on the project, sound designer Leila Evans, explained how for the film, the sounds of the breathing and surging water are ambient sounds taken during recording sessions on hostile nights. In her words, “We couldn’t recreate fear in the studio,” you had to ‘feel’ the wind when it was angry enough to tear you apart.
When ‘Real’ and Reel Became One
The most disturbing element of the documentary ‘Good Boy’, (2025), is the fact that it’s gritty unrealistic authenticity was real.
The mental and emotional fatigue the actors went through aligned brilliantly with the hopelessness their characters portrayed. The set, cold, and lifeless, mirrored the intensely lonely storyline. It was heartening to see and listen to the sheer terror with every scream that was felt, only to be rebuked with agonizing layers of silence, shudder, and tremor.
Once the shooting was done, it is said that Elordi went ‘off the grid’ for a month in order to recuperate on a mental and physical level. In a way, the regret and sense of loss felt by Taylor-Joy, transformed her and thus, she was the first to seek therapy.
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