The boiled bunny from ‘Fatal Attraction’ was real. Here are the details.

Talk about a hare-raising sequence!

With moviegoers anticipating the new Superman, which features an entirely computer-generated pooch doing things no canine outside of Krypton could ever do, it’s amazing to think about all the legendary animal performances in Hollywood history. There are even some movie animals that could easily have been faked, but were actually real for reasons that may seem bizarre. Top of that list: the boiled bunny in Fatal Attraction.

Now, before you freak out, director Adrian Lyne did not go out and slaughter a little fuzzy rabbit just to ensure verisimilitude for his adultery thriller from 1987. But a 2017 book about Sherry Lansing — the producer of Fatal Attraction who later became chief of Paramount — explained how deploying a real, already dead rabbit made for an unusual set.

In case you haven’t seen Fatal Attraction, which was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture and made a whopping $320 million from a $14 million budget, it starred Michael Douglas as a husband and father who strays in his marriage and schtups Glenn Close. Close then becomes clingy, and eventually violent. The most famous scene is when Anne Archer (playing Douglas’ wife) discovers the family’s pet bunny boiled in a pot.

The scene had great social impact. The term “bunny boiler” was born — a jokey, ultimately sexist term for a potential romantic partner with red flags. Whether or not the sequence, or movie in general, inspired an uptick in cold showers for married men is impossible to determine, but we’re going to bet it did.

Anyhow, Lyne told author Stephen Galloway that he and the producers secured a rabbit from a butcher shop, thinking realism was the way to go.

“We tried to take its innards out to make it real,” he said, “but then it didn’t have any heft. It was just like a little bit of skin. So we had to boil it with all of its innards, and the stench was beyond belief. That probably helped Anne because the smell was so bad.”

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The stink of lapin carcass certainly didn’t hurt. Archer received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress — though did lose to Olympia Dukakis for Moonstruck. (Tough break for Archer going up against an all-timer like that. Timing is everything in Hollywood.)

Fatal Attraction was rebooted in 2023 as a series for Paramount +, with Joshua Jackson, Lizzy Caplan, and Amanda Peet in the Douglas, Close, and Archer roles. The recent iteration did not feature any boiled bunnies, real or fake.

Since we’ve gone this far, might as well go all the way. Click play on the video below if you want to see the gross boiled bunny scene again. No one will judge you either way.