Working from home has been a hassle for a lot of us, but The Bubble takes things to a whole other level. Set in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the Judd Apatow–directed movie follows a group of Hollywood superstars (including Karen Gillan, Pedro Pascal and Keegan-Michael Key) as they struggle to finish a Jurassic Park–esque blockbuster while dealing with comically escalating COVID safety protocols. As the production stretches on for months and months, the stars fall into states of mania and depression and start questioning their choice of profession — and eventually their very existence. After watching The Bubble, you’ll probably have (slightly less existential) queries too. We’ve done our best to answer them here.

Where did Judd Apatow get the idea for The Bubble?

Like many of us, writer/director Judd Apatow spent the early days of COVID struggling to come up with something to do. “I would take these long walks every day with a friend, to keep my sanity,” he told Netflix. “One day I said, ‘Maybe I should think of an idea?’ So just as an exercise, I started outlining different ideas for TV shows and movies with no thought that I would make any of them.” The inspiration for The Bubble came from two sources: the NBA’s unprecedented “bubble,” which it used to protect players during a virus-plagued basketball season, and the similarly fraught production of the upcoming Jurassic World sequel, which shut down after a COVID outbreak on set. On top of that, Apatow’s speedy pre-production process had an ulterior motive: His wife, Leslie Mann (who also stars in The Bubble), was decamping for England to shoot a television show. “And I thought, ‘I wonder if I can get this movie together so I can go with her and have something to do,’ ” Apatow said. “I was looking for a way to not be left alone by Leslie.’”

How violent are dinosaurs?

Strictly speaking, this is a question you might have about Cliff Beasts 6, not The Bubble; there are no real dinosaurs in The Bubble, only computer-generated set dressing for the film within the film. The dinosaurs are fictional antagonists in the story of Cliff Beasts, and their violence is a function of the plot. Still, as Cliff Beasts is the 23rd biggest action franchise of all time, it merits some degree of scientific scrutiny. So Tudum reached out to Thomas Richard Holtz, a vertebrate paleontologist and lecturer at the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology. According to Holtz, the question of whether dinosaurs (or “cliff beasts”) would attack humans that they perceive as interlopers in their territory is more complicated than it seems. 

“Historically, animals who have never encountered human beings before really don’t know how to react to us,” Holtz tells Tudum. “Famously, in the Galápagos Islands (which were for a long time uninhabited by humans), Darwin could walk right up to a wild hawk and then knock it off a tree with the butt of his rifle.” Since dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years before humans evolved, we’ve never had an opportunity to test this trend on them. But it’s more than likely that your average velociraptor would have reacted a bit differently than that hawk. “[D]inosaurs (and their pterodactyl cousins) definitely lived in an environment with human-sized (and much larger, of course) bipedal predator[s],” Holts says. “So unlike modern animals, a bipedal form might register as ‘potential attacker’ to many Mesozoic animals.” In other words, it’s probably best to stay away from any cliff beast nests you come across. 

Can you kill dinosaurs by blasting off their privates?

This is a difficult one. While the cliff beasts’ flammable, exploding private parts ultimately prove to be their greatest weakness in Cliff Beasts 6, it would be hard to judge how realistic that notion is without access to more detailed information about their cardiovascular system and the amount of blood they might lose from the resulting explosion. Those details may be out there somewhere; Apatow and the crew were meticulous about designing the cliff beasts. “[I]t was very new to sit in months and months of meetings discussing what the genitals of a dinosaur might look like,” Apatow said.

Regardless, it seems unlikely that a shot to the genitalia alone would be enough to cripple them fully; there are plenty of cases of men surviving full castration, and your average man is presumably much weaker than a cliff beast. On top of that, depending on where they live, the cliff beast in question could be eligible for a hefty workers’ compensation agreement allowing for health care and possibly even a prosthetic reattachment. Ultimately, it’s unclear whether blasting off their privates could effectively stop them from tearing you limb from limb.

How long did it take the cast to learn those TikTok dances?

Throughout The Bubble, we see TikTok star Krystal Kris (played by Apatow’s daughter, Iris) choreograph elaborate dance routines for the cast to post online. It was not a familiar experience for the crew, but they found it ultimately rewarding. “It was so fun getting to channel my inner Britney and work with Ryan Heffington, our choreographer,” Iris told Netflix. “Ryan was just the coolest — he did all of Sia’s music videos.” 

“It was like auditioning for Juilliard,” Pedro Pascal (who plays The Bubble’s fictional Oscar winner, Dieter Bravo) explained about the cast’s dance lessons. “It started out as rehearsals for a couple of hours, and then you open up an email and they’re, like, OK, you’ve got a six-hour dance rehearsal tomorrow. And I was coming here for a Judd Apatow comedy!”

David Duchovny, who plays Cliff Beasts star Dustin Mulray, agrees with Pascal. “Learning the TikTok dances was daunting at first because I’m not a dancer and the routines weren’t that simple,” Duchovny said. “They were much more like dance routines than what I’ve been told on TikTok are fairly simple steps.” Of course, there’s one other possibility for this difference in difficulty: “Unless I’m just that bad,” Duchovny noted.

Could you learn how to fly a helicopter from YouTube?

During the climax of The Bubble, the cast of Cliff Beasts 6 (Spoiler Alert!) mount a desperate escape from the set. After hijacking a helicopter, they struggle to stay aloft as Sean (Key) does his best to learn the chopper’s controls from a YouTube video. Eventually, he succeeds. How likely is that? We asked Keith Harter, CEO of the FAA-certified Los Angeles helicopter company Star Helicopters.

“Typically it takes about eight hours before a person can pick up the helicopter, hover in one spot and then set it back down again,” Harter tells Tudum. “A helicopter private license can be obtained with 40 hours of flight instruction; usually [most] people are ready within 45 hours or so.” And what about YouTube videos? “As for learning to fly a helicopter with only a YouTube video, someone’s going to probably get hurt at the very least,” Harter says.

What’s up with that Beck cameo?

Late in the Cliff Beasts shoot, the studio sends a special video message from Beck to boost the cast’s flagging morale. When the scene was filmed, Apatow and the production team weren’t sure which musician would fill the role, so they instead had the cast react to an unlikely soundtrack: Apatow himself. When the time came to shoot the characters dancing to a cameo that didn’t yet exist, the director took it upon himself. “So I just started singing [Kool & the Gang’s] ‘Ladies Night’ over and over again, while everyone was dancing in a troubling way,” Apatow said. The choice stuck around all the way through post-production and made it into the finished film. “When we were in post, I asked Beck if he would let me film him singing the song,” said Apatow. “And he did!”