Hunky “Pan Am” Star Mike Vogel Talks Manscaping, Prosthetic Penises and Wrestling Anacondas

If you can get a guy as hot as Pan Am star Mike Vogel to talk about nether regions in any context, it’s a win no matter how you slice it. Such was the case when we spoke with the hunky blond actor last month at ABC’s post-panel cocktail party.

The context? A discussion of the “manscaping” bit in last year’s comedy She’s Out of My League, in which Vogel co-starred as Jack, an airport co-worker of Jay Baruchel’s character. The scene has actor Nate Torrence, playing Devon, taking an electric razor to Baruchel’s “private area”.

“Originally I was the one that was supposed to do the ‘scaping,” said Vogel. “And then we realized how much funnier it would be…to have Nate do it. And it was hilarious…watching Nate in-between takes, cause there’s just this…there’s just this penis sitting there in his face.”

Well okay, maybe not a real penis.

“They had an actual stunt cock,” continued Vogel. “What it was, was it was [actually] a stunt ass, but with the ass came everything else.”

That’s right – a sculpted ass. You heard it here first.

But back to Pan Am. Interestingly, the series represents a “promotion” for Vogel in that instead of portraying a baggage handler, as he did in She’s Out of My League, here he’s playing an actual pilot. It’s a role the actor is intimately familiar with off-screen as well.

“Aviation for me has been a huge love all my life,” said Vogel, a licensed pilot. “There were many things that attracted me to this [project]. The look of it was beautiful – it looked like a movie. But it’s something that sort of encompasses everything I love in history – in flying, but also in the acting. It was sort of a no-brainer and a win-win for me to be a part of it.”

Pan Am focuses on a group of young flight attendants in the 1960s, a time when the titular airline was billing itself as the most glamorous way to fly. Vogel plays Dave, who has ascended to captain at an unusually young age.

To prepare for the role, the actor did quite a bit of research on the airline pilots of the day to get a better sense of what it was like. Turns out they were quite a hardy breed, with many having served as fighter pilots during wartime.

“I read about one pilot who was taxiing on the Amazon River to fuel up,” said Vogel. “He looked out his window, and he saw an anaconda floating in the water. He tells his co-pilot, ‘Here. Take the plane.’ Takes his jacket off, jumps into the river, grabs the anaconda, wrestles it back to the plane and took it home as a pet. So you know, they were a breed apart.”

During the Pan Am panel discussion that took place earlier in the day, some critics derided the series for glamorizing the lives of the stewardesses, who were subject to demeaning pre-flight weigh-ins, grooming and girdle checks. However, Vogel (echoing co-star Christina Ricci) noted that despite all those things, the women enjoyed an unusual degree of freedom.

“The reality is, these women were out seeing the world when most men went to work and came home every day and only heard about the things that these women were doing,” said Vogel. “And not only that, these women were smart as a whip. I mean, you had to be multi-lingual, you had to be a college graduate…which for the time, for a woman, was huge.

“I mean…[former Pan Am stewardess/executive-producer Nancy Hult Ganis] brought a lot of her stewardess friends to set, her former friends,” he continued. “They’re all successful, they’re all every bit as beautiful today as they were then, and they are on it, and sharp, and smart as anything. …Each one of them has some exotic accent, they’re all speaking in different languages…it’s phenomenal.”

Indeed, the real lives of these women were more intriguing than anything the writers of the show could ever possibly dream up. Truth is frequently stranger than fiction, after all – not to mention funnier, at least judging from an aviation-themed anecdote Vogel had earlier offered from the set of She’s Out of My League.

The incident in question revolved around the character of Cam, an Air Force fighter pilot played by actor Geoff Stults. In the film, a joke is made of the fact that he’s named his plane “Foot Long”, a supposed allusion to…well, you know.

“The writers thought they were really being funny…they were like ‘haha, this is amazing!’” recalled Vogel. “Well, the real pilot of that airplane [flown by Stults’ character] walked up to us...introduces himself and says: ‘Hey Mike, my name’s Tea Bag.’”

Pan Am airs Sunday nights at 10 PM on ABC