A woman was kneeling in front of Alex Sim-Wise, gluing a pubic wig onto her, and Alex had only just learned what one was.
This was a film set. Specifically the set of The Bank Job, the 2008 crime thriller starring Jason Statham, where Alex had been cast as a 1970s stripper standing on a table.
The costume came with extras.
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“They took me to one side and asked if I was alright wearing a merkin,” she told the Option One Podcast, presented by Babestation.
“I didn’t even know what one was. They had this lady glueing it on and I was just thinking, ‘This is a lot’.”
She stayed. “I really wanted to be in the film, so I just went along with it.”
Fifty pints of beer and a lot of refluffing
The role paid better than most extra work, mainly because of the outfit. It also involved being soaked.
“My part in the film was getting a pint of beer poured down on me about 50 times,” Alex said.
Each reset meant the crew had to dry her off, redo her hair, and start again.
Somewhere between takes, Statham clocked what was happening to her.
“Jason Statham was standing there looking at me and he said, ‘I hope you’re getting paid lots of money for this’.”
Alex went for the joke. “I said, ‘Actually I’m getting paid in bourbon biscuits’.”
He believed her.
The toilet exchange
The day got odder. Wandering the set with rollers still in, Alex was trying to find a stylist when Statham emerged from the loos.
“He joked, ‘You don’t want to go in the ladies, you want to come in here with me’,” she said.
“I just walked upstairs.”
Why it matters
Alex came up through the 2000s lads’ mag scene, the kind of career that left a thick trail of stories and not always a clear way to use them.
Now she’s doing what a lot of that generation is doing: turning the archive into content.
The Bank Job anecdote isn’t a CV line. It’s an episode of a podcast, a memoir chapter, a clip.
The work and the retelling of the work have become the same job.
From Melinda Messenger to a memoir
She traces the whole thing back to being 14 and fixated on one person.
“I was just really obsessed with Melinda Messenger,” she said.
“I just wanted to be a stripper and be really sexy.”
There was a stretch where she lost the thread of it. “I lost myself for a while,” she said.
“Now I’m trying to get back in touch with the things that made me unique in the first place.”
That reset now includes a memoir, covering everything from Japanese vending machines selling used underwear to cosplay and fetish clubs.
The Bank Job, presumably, gets a page.
The creator economy keeps finding new uses for old careers, and the nostalgia market for 2000s British media is wide open right now.
Page Three icon Rhian hosts the podcast Alex appeared on.
The names from that era aren’t disappearing. They’re rebranding.
Whether the memoir confirms the bourbon biscuits story, we’ll have to wait and see. Statham still doesn’t know.
