It's maybe The 40-Year-Old Virgin's most famous scene -- and Steve Carell almost came out of it forever changed.
Director Judd Apatow spoke about the 2005 hit comedy in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published on Monday, Aug. 25, in honor of the film's 20th anniversary. During the conversation, he reflected on the scene where Carell's Andy Stitzer, the titular character, got his chest waxed with bloody and hilarious results.
"We were trying to think of some makeover sequence, but that had been done to death," Apatow, 57, remembered, and they were looking for an "original" approach. "Steve said, 'Maybe you could just wax me for real, and it'll hurt so much, it'll be funny. People will just be able to tell that it's actually happening.' "
After deciding to move forward with the idea, the production had five cameras going at once to capture every reaction by Carell, 63, as well as costars Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen and actress Miki Mia. "It turned out to be as funny as we hoped it would be because it's the kind of joke you can only do one time," Apatow said.
But things did go a little awry while making the scene. "We wanted the waxer to be someone who was an actress and also a professional waxer," the director said, explaining how they cast Mia in the role. "Miki Mia claimed to have been a waxer, but I think maybe she had only done it once because she clearly didn't know how to do it, and we almost ripped his nipples off during the shoot."
In a 2005 interview with Movie Web, Mia, who has also appeared on How I Met Your Mother and Nip/Tuck, described herself as a "professional waxer" and called the scene with Carrell "the cleanest job I've ever done."
In response to Apatow's latest comments, Mia tells PEOPLE via email that the director was "aware that I helped my aunt's salon, waxing in Japan, at the auditions."
Because Carell had "untrimmed 10-inch super long thick packed chest hair," which Mia says "was impossible to wax like that in the first place," she "suggested to trim down [his hair beforehand] but Judd and Steve wanted the scene to be funny so I followed their instructions."
"Judd Apatow directed me during the waxing scene which I only had a few lines in to start with," she recalls. "I followed his direction and improvised anything he wished for me to do." And that direction included "waxing over his nipples," and being "told to laugh at Steve and to say, 'You p----!' "
She adds, "Sure enough, Steve had an amazing reaction to that."
The director also reflected on one of the funniest parts of the scene -- how Carell yells both expletives and normal words, including "Kelly Clarkson." He credited those jokes to Rogen, who costarred in the film as one of Andy's coworkers, Cal, alongside Rudd as David, Romany Malco as Jay and Catherine Keener as love interest Trish Piedmont.
"Seth was given the job to create a list of curses and a list of clean words that Steve could shout. For some reason, he wrote, 'Kelly Clarkson,' and that turned out to be the funniest one," Apatow said.
In May, Rogen, 43, opened up to PEOPLE about the raunchy comedy. "It was the first movie I made where I feel like ... I was a co-producer on the movie and I helped write a lot of it with Steve Carell and Judd," he shared. "It was the first movie that I was a part of that I really had a creative voice in, and a lot of the R-rated humor and tone came from me really advocating for that."
"And so it was really rewarding when it came out and people really responded to both the heart and the filthiness of it," he explained.
The 40-Year-Old Virgin marked Carell's first leading role in a film, and it hit theaters on Aug. 19, 2005, just months after The Office premiered on NBC. Together, the two hits turned Carell a comedy superstar.
But, Apatow told THR, the movie was almost derailed before it even got started. The studio shut down production in the middle of the third day of shooting, he said, and one of their complaints was about Carell.
"They thought that Steve looked like a serial killer, which he did. He had these glasses, and he was wearing a Jeffrey Dahmer-type Members Only jacket," Apatow recalled. But they talked over the notes and soon shooting was back on.
The movie, which opened to critical praise, ultimately made over $177 million at the box office.