Andrew Scott grips a younger man by the jaw and says the line that launched a thousand thirsty screenshots. “You’re just a hole. You’re just a hole for daddy.”
Then he spits in Leo Reich‘s mouth.
That is roughly three minutes of screen time, planted at the very top of the first episode of It Gets Worse. It has already done more promotional heavy lifting than most series manage across an entire season.
Three Minutes, Infinite Reposts
The clip landed in early September, weeks before anyone had seen a full episode, and the gay internet promptly lost its composure. “A SECOND ‘KNEEL’ HAS HIT THE TOWERS,” read one YouTube comment flagged by Esquire UK. “This is the sexiest thing I’ve seen since Heated Rivalry,” read another.
The timing was the trick. Scott’s character, a therapist called Brian, tells Ethan (Reich): “Sorry, I actually have a real client in 15 minutes, so do you want to do this?” Then comes the slap, the reassurance that Ethan is “fine,” and the instruction to open his mouth.
Reich was as surprised as anyone that this became the show’s calling card. “It came as a surprise to me that it’s the first thing that we put out, because he’s in it for about three minutes,” he told British GQ. “And I hope people don’t think they’re gonna watch a show that’s fully me and Andrew Scott.”
The Pitch Was a Text Message
Reich didn’t audition Scott so much as ambush him. “What I said in the text was, ‘I really thought of you while I was writing this.’ Which is obviously an absolutely bizarre thing to say,” Reich recalled. “And then as soon as I sent it, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s literally the worst thing I could possibly say.’ But he was like, ‘Yeah, it sounds really fun, it’s really funny, I’m so up for it.'”
The spit, at least, was planned. “The spitting was in the script, yeah,” Reich said. “Obviously, in my head when I’m writing it, I’m thinking of the one shot that you actually use. [But] every single take I’m getting spat in the mouth.”
How many takes? “A lot. A lot of takes.”
What Scott Actually Thinks About All This
For a man whose awards-season dance card is filling up with Elsinore, in which he plays Ian Charleson performing Hamlet while dying of AIDS, Scott has been cheerfully candid about the mechanics of the moment. “It’s subversive and it’s transgressive, and I really love all that kind of stuff,” he told Out, during his Out100 Icon of the Year cover interview.
He frames the approach as unbothered professionalism. “I have no qualms about doing that stuff. It’s part of our human nature, and you approach those scenes in the same way you do any other scene,” he said. “But if it’s done with a degree of lightness, I always think that’s much more fun. And then, I don’t know, people get a bit hysterical about sex, I think.”
And the scene itself? “The internet stuff may or may not happen, but that was just a really fun morning’s work. We had such a laugh doing it.”
It Was Never Only About the Spit
Reich knows the discourse has drifted past his actual joke. “There were a couple of comments about the fact that he’s a therapist, and I think they’ve slightly misunderstood what is ultimately the core joke of the scene, which is that’s not the dynamic they have together,” he told GQ.
The show around that scene is a six-part A24 comedy for Channel 4 and Canada’s Crave, narrated by Zadie Smith, which premiered at the BFI London Film Festival on 14 October and hit UK screens on 22 October. Paramount+ picked up the US rights, with the full box set arriving 6 November. Channel 4’s own logline calls it “three young people” staring at “their humiliating jobs, their non-existent love lives and their rapidly dwindling will to live.”
Reich pitched it as “Girls meets Peep Show,” then immediately doubted the label. “I’m sceptical of the idea that generations have any real unifying features across the board, so I don’t want it to be like: this is a gen Z sitcom!”
The reviews have been mixed but not unkind. The Independent called the show “a bit of a middle-aged television executive’s dream,” noting that its sensibility makes it “ideal for newspaper comment pieces and TikTok clip-farming” — which is precisely what the spit accomplished. Metro‘s critic admitted: “After Andrew ‘hole for daddy’ Scott broke the internet… I have good news. It gets better.”
Reich, for his part, seems at peace with being lovingly skewered along with everyone else. “Sometimes I want to be made fun of by TV,” he told The Guardian, “and I think the point of this is really lovingly making fun of everyone I’ve ever met.”
