Bombshell Used Foot-Fetish Site to Re-create Fox News Office

Alexa, play “Fetish” by Selena Gomez. Photo: Hilary B Gayle/Lionsgate

And the Oscar goes to … foot-fetish website moderators! The upcoming movie Bombshell, which follows three female Fox News employees, Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron), Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), and the fictional Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie), went to extreme lengths for costume and set-design accuracy. For example, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Charlize Theron had prosthetics sculpted by Academy Award winner Kazuhiro Tsuji in order to transform into Megyn Kelly. And the detailed production design was accomplished by … browsing foot-fetish websites.

Without Fox News’ cooperation, Bombshell production designer Mark Ricker had to use a system of “moles” to build the Fox News offices in the former Los Angeles Times offices. He used any photos he could find online, including selfies from employees and foot-fetish pics where you can see the office surroundings in the background. The female Fox News hosts all had to adhere to what costume designer Colleen Atwood called Roger Ailes’s “good girl but with a wink” look: tight dresses and tall stiletto heels. “[Ailes] had a clever kind of intuition about what people would notice — and especially, obviously, men,” Atwood said. “He branded that look in a way.” As a result, pictures of the anchors’ feet in high heels ended up on foot-fetish sites, helping Ricker re-create the offices in painstaking detail. “Ninety-eight percent of the people who see the movie aren’t going to know what the inner offices look like, but the other 2 percent of the audience will be the ones who worked there, and they will know,” Ricker said. “I just wanted them to think, ‘Oh my God, how’d they get it so right?’” Sure, but will they be pleased when they find out there are pics of their feet on fetish sites?