2023 Rewind: Rory Culkin Goes Full-Frontal, with Strawberries, in 'Swarm'

This piece is part of EDGE's 2023 Rewind series. We're reaching into our archives and sharing some of our favorite stories from the past year.

Rory Culkin's... strawberries... are helping drive the online buzz around "The Swarm," the darkly parodic new horror thriller miniseries on Amazon Prime.

Entertainment Weekly recaps that in the premiere episode, Culkin shows off his bare bod to the camera in a scene set the morning after his character and Dre (Dominique Fishback), the series' protagonist, have hooked up.

"Dre's greeted by her one-night stand, naked as the day he was made, and he offers her a translucent bowl of strawberries, which he places, artfully, next to his flaccid penis," the entertainment outlet describes.

And the strawberries, EW declares, are not necessarily the tastiest thing on the screen.

"First of all, Rory Culkin's a snack, everyone," the article declares, before sharing a tweet from media critic Amelia Nancy Harvey, who declares, "I was not expecting Rory Culkin to give me this in Swarm."

EW shared the behind-the-scenes origin of the memorable shot, noting that it's a fictionalized replay of something that happened the morning after series creator Donald Glover (the same man who brought us "Atlanta") had a hookup.

Talking to Insider, series co-creator Janine Nabers explained, "Donald told this very funny story about a girl who he really liked, and how after they hooked up, he was standing there with a bowl of cherries, just being like, 'Hey'."

Added Nabers: "She was like, so not into it, because it's so weird to hook up with a guy that you barely know and then wake up with him holding a bowl of cherries."

In a review of the new series (all seven half-hour episodes of which dropped at the streamer on March 17), UK newspaper The Guardian reported that the series experiments with a variety of genres, including "elevated horror, stripper heist movie, a spoof of true crime documentaries, a riff on blithely sinister 'maximizing potential' cults, among others.

"But it is primarily and provocatively a bloody satire of fandom and the extreme devotion leveled at pop stars," with Fishback's Dre being an obsessed stan who is homicidally devoted to a Beyonce-like pop star named Ni'Jah (Nirine S. Brown).

The review is mixed, but fans will have the final say as to whether the show has deep roots or merely offers low-hanging fruit. One thing to take note of is that strawberry season is evidently short-lived on the show, with Culkin being credited at IMDb with only a single episode.