Stephen Merchant’s Cut ‘Beauty And The Beast’ Cameo Revealed

Beauty and the Beast has just arrived on home video, and with it, details on the film’s deleted scenes have emerged. It’s recently been learned that Stephen Merchant had a cameo role in the film that would have featured a joke that would have been a lot filthier than what you’d expect in typical Disney movie.

CinemaBlend is reporting that two brief scenes in the film were cut, both of which would have happened toward the end of the movie. The first would have been a scene where Le Fou (Josh Gad) runs off to the bathroom to hide, only to discover that the toilet (played by Merchant) was among the castle’s enchanted objects, at which point Le Fou starts to shout a certain expletive appropriate to the situation before the camera would cut away to a shot of him running away and screaming. The second was a scene where we’d see him as a human after the spell is lifted – he would have told Le Fou that the first thing he’d do now that he was human again would be to brush his teeth.

Honestly, it’s probably for the best that this cameo was cut. While Beauty and the Beast has been criticized for being a little too faithful to the original animated feature it’s based on, going with literal toilet humor seems like it’d be incredibly crass, gross, and out-of-place in a movie that’s fundamentally about the true elegance that people can have. Plus, it’s a rather crappy way to make use of an actor like Stephen Merchant.

Beauty and the Beast is now available on home video. The film stars Emma Watson as Belle, Dan Stevens as the Beast, Luke Evans as Gaston, Josh Gad as Le Fou, Ewan McGregor as Lumière, Sir Ian McKellen as Cogsworth, Kevin Kline as Belle’s father Maurice, Emma Thompson as Mrs. Potts, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Plumette.

Source: CinemaBlend