Sweet Tooth, a loose adaptation of Jeff Lemire’s comic series of the same name, is an undersung treat of Netflix’s library. The post-apocalyptic coming-of-age quest mixes the dreamlike qualities of a fable with the factional drama of a Walking Dead story, in a world where all human children are born as animal hybrids and a deadly virus called the Sick whittles away at teens and adults.
But in filming for the final season of Sweet Tooth, premiering today, showrunner Jim Mickle says that if anything, his long-running actors were excited about the prospect of their characters contracting the Sick.
You know, because it meant they’d get to try out the pinkie-finger-wiggling machine.
In Sweet Tooth, the earliest symptom of the Sick is that the patient develops an uncontrollable twitch in their littlest fingers. It’s a great visual, a tiny detail that represents huge revelations. Characters conceal and reveal their hands depending on who they trust; other characters demand to see their hands before allowing them close. In Sweet Tooth, a money shot of a twitching pinkie finger can be a shocking twist.
But we wondered: Was shaking one’s pinkie finger in complete isolation to the rest of the hand difficult for the Sweet Tooth cast?
“Yes!” Mickle told Polygon over video chat. “But you could tell that they were excited, like, I get to try [the pinkie finger twitch]! They would always get kind of into it.”
Mickle’s goal for the finger shaking was to make it look like an involuntary movement. “You know sometimes your eyelid flutters, or something, you have a little movement? That was exactly what I wanted it to be: a weird, involuntary thing. […] It has to be more than just you can do naturally or organically. It has to be a thing that feels like your body is reflexively doing that.”
Achieving that effect unaided was not always easy, but for anyone who found it difficult, Sweet Tooth’s effects team developed a bespoke pinkie-wiggling machine using the spin of a laptop’s hard drive. “That was the motor,” Mickle said, “and they connected that, basically taped it to a wire that went up someone’s arm and they just animated the hard drive and it would actually [shake their finger].”
By season 3, the pinkie-wiggling machine had evolved to boast its own motor that would sit underneath the actor’s clothing on their back, “and it would run up a cable that would go on your [arm with a] bicycle brake cable, and we tape it to the pinkie.”
Still, the devices remained finicky and were prone to failing entirely if the actor bent their elbow. “We spent probably days of our lives on set just going, OK, roll! and you’d roll and be like, OK, and pinkie! and it would just…” Here Mickle raised his hand and twitched his pinkie a measly one time. “…do that and stop. And we would constantly do that.”
Despite the frustrations, Mickle said, the cast was gung-ho for the device. Without wanting to reveal too much, he did let on that with the Sick becoming a bigger threat, a number of characters “that we don’t think will ever die of that suddenly start shaking, and I think [the actors] really got into it, because they never thought they’d have to do it.”
Sweet Tooth season 3 is out now on Netflix.
