How ‘12 12 12’ Pulled Off That “Surprising, Strangely Seductive” Naked Opening Scene
Few television shows have a more compelling opening scene than Apple TV‘s new heist drama, 12 12 12.
Rather than play it safe with an introductory shot of FBI Agent Jack Strickland (Anthony Mackie) or criminal extraordinaire Paul Galvin (Jamie Dornan), 12 12 12 immediately takes viewers inside a bank vault in Zurich, Switzerland, where a naked man crawls out of a small lockbox, putting Galvin’s grand plan into motion.
The ambitious scene, directed by Kari Skogland, required the 12 12 12 team to find a movement specialist to stand in — or twist, bend, and squeeze in — as Julius Feldmeier’s flexible safecracking character, Alberich Streutzel. Some viewers will surely find the sight of a human hand, then foot, then body rolling out of an abnormally small space and cracking back into place uncomfortable, but the unique sequence was a dream for creators, showrunners, writers, and EPs Dudi Appleton and Jim Keeble.
“It’s always been a fantasy of ours, right? To see a naked man come out of a box, that’s fantastic,” Keeble jokingly told Decider over Zoom. “We lived it!” Appleton added.
After a quick chuckle, the 12 12 12 creators dove deep into the dream series opening, sharing insight into how the visual of a naked man coming out of a box symbolically ties into the show’s larger narrative.
“I think we love the idea of this beautiful Swiss, pristine, brass, gold, marble — the finest place — and out of it comes this strange creature, this strange Alberich, King of the Elves,” Appleton explained.
“It had a sort of fairy tale quality to it. We wanted to set up with something that would be surprising, but somehow strangely seductive — that this isn’t gonna be an average heist, and it’s gonna be quite personal,” Keeble continued. “He sort of comes to life. In a way, all of Paul’s crew come to life during the show. They’re all, to some extent, stuck before they join his strange family. So it was kind of symbolic of that, of this rebirth that they all had.”
When writing the unorthodox first scene, 12 12 12‘s creators also wanted to tease their story’s unique structure, with each episode unfolding across three timelines: 12 months of planning, 12 hours pulling off the heist, and the 12 days that followed. “We wanted to say, instead of going into a box, you’re gonna come out of a box, just to put you on notice that the structure, the form, the story is just a little bit different from what you expect,” Appleton said.
The team flew in a movement specialist who wrapped himself into a box. Then after seeing a man push himself through a tennis racket at London’s Covent Garden Piazza, the creators wrote a similar scene that appears later in the series and hired a second movement specialist.
“We thought, ‘That’s just fantastic. We’ve got to use that somewhere… We needed one [movement specialist] for the box and one for the tennis racket, because they didn’t do the same stuff. One did arms, the other did legs. And the guy for the tennis racket was actually the guy we saw in Covent Garden. So we got the same guy,” Appleton recalled, joking, “We tried to get Julius to do it. But he didn’t disconnect in that way.”
As 12 12 12‘s jaw-dropping opening scene teased, the Apple TV series is jam-packed with twists. So buckle up and brace for a wild, unexpected ride.
Stay tuned for more 12 12 12 coverage from Decider.
New episodes of 12 12 12 premiere Fridays on Apple TV.
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