The ‘Materialists’ Leg Lengthening Plotline, Explained

This article contains spoilers for the movie Materialists.

About midway through Celine Song’s new film Materialists, Lucy, the matchmaker played by Dakota Johnson, notices a scar on the leg of her boyfriend, Harry, an obscenely wealthy, obscenely handsome man portrayed by Pedro Pascal.

Though the audience isn’t sure what the scar is supposed to represent, Lucy immediately understands. Near the end of the film she breaks up with Harry, realizing the perfect world he’s offering her isn’t enough. During their gentle, bittersweet parting he confesses what she already knew: He had a leg lengthening surgery, which added six inches to his height. He and his brother—who Lucy had previously successfully set up with one of her other clients—went and got the procedure done together.

There’s no judgment on Lucy’s part. She says too has had enhancements, pointing to her nose and her chest. If anyone understands the perils of the dating market, she does, having spent her career listening to clients offer extremely specific descriptions of their ideal partners.

But leg lengthening is an expensive, painful surgery that seems more radical than, say, a nose or a boob job. And yet it’s not the stuff of fantasy. In fact, GQ published a viral feature in 2022 all about the leg lengthening boom. Chris Gayomali reported that Las Vegas-based doctor Kevin Debiparshad of the LimbplastX institute had seen patient numbers explode since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, Debiparshad was getting as many as 50 new clients a month, for a surgery that has starting costs between $70,000 and $150,000.

So how does Gayomali feel now that leg lengthening has hit the big screen? “I’m just glad it’s in the zeitgeist,” he says. (Leg lengthening surgery was also the subject of an SNL sketch, “JNCO Longs,” that dropped shortly after the article.)

But what exactly happens when a guy goes in to get his legs lengthened? Basically, both of his femurs are broken and adjustable nails are inserted into the bone. From there, the nails are extended via remote control one millimeter every day for 90 days. It hurts. A lot.

It seems like something only a masochist would endure but, when reporting the story, Gayomali was struck by just how “normal” the men who had the procedure done were.

“I thought they would be really traumatized and sort of damaged in some ways, but it’s kind of just like, ‘No, it was this thing I thought about all time, and, in getting leg lengthening done, now I don’t think about that,’” he explains. “I’m like, ‘Oh you really can’t put a price on that level of the way you actually move through the world.’”

That’s reflected in Materialists, where there’s almost a casualness to the way someone like Harry seemingly approached leg lengthening. While Song’s screenplay doesn’t spend too much time elaborating on the circumstances that led him to get the surgery, it’s understood that he felt insecure about his height, recognized how his short stature impacted his dating prospects, and had the financial means to make himself taller.