When people think of the 1999 masterpiece "Fight Club," the image that might first come to mind is of Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) stoically smoking that cigarette as the camera pushes in on her. It makes sense that this shot has stuck so firmly in people's minds: we may know that smoking is bad for you (like, reallybad for you), but tragically, that doesn't change the fact that smoking looks cool.
At the very least, it looks cinematic. Swirling cigarette smoke is captivating on camera, and it can
add some interesting visuals to what might otherwise be a dull-looking scene. That's not even getting into the way smoking can be used to convey character, or to set the pacing for the scene, or as the impetus for two characters to even start talking in the first place. There's no wonder period pieces are so popular; only there can directors take advantage of all the cinematic benefits smoking has to offer.
The downside to a movie having its characters smoke cigarettes, however, is that the actors often have to inhale those cigarette toxins. And if they're working for a famously neurotic director like David Fincher, the actor might have to smoke far more of those deadly cigarettes than they can handle. That's what happened to Helena Bonham Carter, who recalled in a 2009 interview having to do so many takes of her smoking scenes that she developed bronchitis.
"I had to have an X-ray because I got bronchitis — surprise, surprise — during the six months of filming. And Fincher does so many takes and lots of smoke shots," Bonham Carter explained. "He got obsessed with the smoke. It had to float in a particular way. So I was just always sitting there in a cemetery of cigarette butts."
Read more: 15 Best Movie Plot Twists Of All Time, Ranked
How Do Other Actors Deal With Having To Smoke Constantly?
While many actors smoke with real cigarettes for authenticity's sake, it's grown more common for actors to use herbal cigarettes. These are less toxic than regular cigarettes, although they have the unfortunate downside of tasting terrible. Jon Hamm, whose lead character on "Mad Men" seemingly smoked two packs a day, has talked about how miserable he found those herbal cigarettes to be:
"They taste like a mix of pot and soap. ... Somebody actually watched the pilot and counted the amount of cigarettes I smoked in the pilot — it was 74 or some ridiculous number like that. But you have to remember that shooting a scene is not shooting one take of a scene — it's four or five set-ups, and three or four takes on each set-up. So every time you see me light a cigarette, I do it five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 times. You can hear from my voice that it's a debilitating endeavor."
Cillian Murphy, whose "Peaky Blinders' character also smoked countless cigarettes per episode, has also complained about that horrendous herbal taste. "My next character will not be a smoker," he told the Guardian. "They can't be good for you. Even herbal cigarettes have health warnings now."
The other issue with herbal cigarettes is that they produce less smoke than real cigarettes, which is probably why Fincher had Bonham Carter smoking the real ones. ("Mindhunter" actor Alex Morf later confirmed in a 2018 interview that Fincher "doesn't like the way that herbal cigarettes look on film.") But despite how much nicer those real cigarettes look on camera, for TV shows, it tends to drain the actors quickly. As Hamm put it in another interview:
"Some of the younger actors [wanted to] smoke real cigarettes, because, 'We really want to feel it and do it.' I was like, 'Let me know how that goes.' Within three days they were yellow and sallow. It's a terrible thing to do."
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