It’s one of the oddest and most memorable moments in Jane Campion’s Oscar frontrunner The Power of the Dog: Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), having just been brutally mocked by Benedict Cumberbatch’s callous rancher Phil Burbank, heads outside to get in some quick and furious Hula-Hooping exercise.
The scene sticks out for a few reasons. The seemingly anachronistic presence of the Hula-Hoop in the early 1900s is part of it (in fact, Hula-Hoops have been around since 3000 BCE). But it’s the abruptness of the moment that really grounds it in our memories. The film cuts to Smit-McPhee for a little more than a split second. He swings his hips for a few moments, the hoop falls, and the scene is over.
If the scene seems improvisational, that’s because it sort of was. “That actually started in the rehearsals — when it was just Jane and I, we got to really go into that internalized world of Peter and his secret mission,” Smit-McPhee told Netflix’s Queue. “She would always bring a hula hoop with her, and she just randomly asked me, ‘Can you do the hula hoop?’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m not really that coordinated.’ And it turns out, I’m a natural.”
In fact, the moment wasn’t even in the script. “So one day, we had this little bit of time left, and we just quickly got this B-roll of me angrily, furiously doing a hula hoop,” Smit-McPhee said. “It was amazing watching the movie the first time through, where they inserted that in editing. I was pleasantly surprised.” So were we.
