This Is The One Chilling Chernobyl Scene That Had To Be Cut
One thing you can say for Chernobyl is that it's unlikely to spin out a 'director's cut' with about three minutes more footage, as Marvel has taken to doing to wring the last of the toothpaste out of the tube. Nobody who's watched Chernobyl sat back at the end of it and wondered if there were any deleted scenes showing gangrenous radiation burns in a bit more detail. You get the feeling you've seen all you'd ever really like to see.
But there was one scene which nearly made the series that sounds like it could have added even more dread to the already fairly overwhelming levels of dread on show, if only budgetary restraints hadn't got in the way.
"There was a scene in episode two, it wasn't lost in the script stage, but we couldn’t completely shoot it because we just didn't have the budget for what I wanted to do," writer Craig Mazin told Vulture.
"That's the one thing I wish I had been able to show, which is essentially the May Day celebration, the parade, in Kiev and Minsk that happened on May 1, five days after the explosion, where people are marching in the streets and the citizens simply haven’t been told that a nuclear reactor is open and burning, maybe an hour's drive away. We couldn't do it because, it turns out, parades are expensive."
Shame. What's the going rate for an intercontinental ballistic missile and a few woolly hats? A couple of tens of millions? Maybe? Push the boat out a bit, HBO.
This story originally appeared on Esquire.co.uk. Minor edits have been made by the Esquiremag.ph editors.
