’80s Icon Recalls Strange Advice to Stuff Shorts with Socks for Film with Caitlyn Jenner

One of the biggest stars of the 1980s is looking back on a bizarre moment he and Caitlyn Jenner shared on set.

Steve Guttenberg — who rose to stardom with roles in hits including Diner (1982), Police Academy (1984), Cocoon (1985) and Three Men And A Baby (1987) — recalled how he and Jenner, 75, got an unusual request when they were filming the 1980 film Can’t Stop The Music.

The 66-year-old actor said he and the Olympic decathlete — who was making her film debut — were asked to ‘stuff’ their shorts with socks in order to give them more prominent bulges, according to Page Six.

‘I did wear really skimpy shorts,’ he explained to the publication earlier this week.

Guttenberg said that it was a request from Allan Carr, who co-wrote and produced the film, that he and Jenner ‘stuff our shorts with socks to make it look a little bigger.’

‘We didn’t need it by the way. I mean I told Alan, “No need for a sock!”‘ Guttenberg recalled joking.

Despite the attempt to make Guttenberg and Jenner appear more virile, Can’t Stop The Music ended up being a box office flop and a critical bomb.

The disco musical was a biography charting the rise of The Village People — though it was fictional — and featured Guttenberg as a very loose stand-in for the group’s co-creator, the French songwriter and record producer Jacques Morali.

Jenner, who came out as a transgender woman in 2015, played a lawyer who confusingly found himself swept up in the creation of the Village People, leading him to quit his job after his firm refuses to represent the burgeoning disco group.

Carr, the same person who allegedly convinced Guttenberg and Jenner to stuff their shorts on set, saw the film as a star-making vehicle for the Olympic gold medalist, and in 1979 he told the New York Times that Can’t Stop The Music would make Jenner ‘the Robert Redford of the ’80s.’

But following the critical and commercial failure of the cult camp film, Jenner’s acting work was confined to television appearances, and she didn’t appear again in a feature film until 2011’s critically reviled comedy Jack And Jill, which starred Adam Sandler, Katie Holmes and Al Pacino.

Guttenberg, who also spoke about his career heights to Page Six, warned that actors need to be wary of developing too much of an ego, ‘because it’s a very fragile business and you cannot believe what you see.’

‘You’re very important today, and tomorrow nobody knows who you are,’ he said.

He said he had tried to be ‘level-headed’ about the hot-and-cold nature of Hollywood, where success is reward but failure can lead actors to quickly be dumped. 

Guttenberg’s most recent project is the Lifetime movie Kidnapped By A Killer, in which he plays John Edward Robinson, who is the first serial killer reported to have used the internet to connect him with his victims.

Robinson, who admitted to committing multiple murders, is currently serving multiple life sentences from a trial in Missouri and is on death row after being convicted of three murders in Kansas. 

Guttenberg said he put in ‘a ton of research’ to play the convicted killer.

‘I thought it was an incredible opportunity, because to play a serial killer, most actors, you get one chance in your whole life to play a serial killer and this is a good one,’ he said.

He added that he was confined to a makeup chair for an hour and a half every day of shooting to achieve Robinson’s distinctive look, and he was even forced to put on weight to look more like the convicted killer.

‘It was great,’ the Three Men And A Baby star joked. ‘[I ate] ice cream, pasta, that part was really fun.’

Guttenberg gained renewed attention earlier this year when he helped his neighbors evacuate Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood when deadly fires swept through the city in January. 

His own $5 million Palisades home was ultimately spared, but it suffered ‘terrible smoke damage.’

‘Everything needs to be replaced,’ he said, and the job will likely take a full year.

In the meantime, Guttenberg has been living across the country in New York while his West Coast home is repaired. 

The temporary move overlapped with the end of the Cocoon star’s marriage, as he filed to divorce his wife-of-six-years Emily Smith in April. 

They had been together since at least 2014 and tied the knot in 2019. 

Guttenberg was previously married to the model Denise Bixler from 1988 until their 1991 separation. They divorced the following year.