TV show and movie sex scenes aren’t as sexy as they look, at least for the actors. There’s bright lights, strangers holding cameras and boom mics, and as as Anne Hathaway once put it, “There is that revoltingly embarrassing moment when you have to take your clothes off in front of strangers.”
However, now that intimacy coordinators are mandatory on set, at least the performers can feel like they’re in a safe space. Emma Stone, for instance, praised the coordinator for Poor Things and said they have a “really beautiful relationship that I found extremely, extremely meaningful.” But what happens when it’s high school all over again, and a performer gets accidentally aroused?
“Here’s the thing. This isn’t actually very common,” intimacy coordinator Brooke M. Haney told Us Weekly. “We’re at work, right? With the lights bearing down, microphones, a couple of cameras in your face, director, DP [director of photography], and other necessary crew watching on monitors, it’s just not that sexy.” But, she continued, “sometimes bodies have physiological responses that are outside of our control. When that does happen, I tell the actor to do a few push-ups or some jumping jacks. That moves the blood to a different location and we’re all good.”
It happens. Henry Cavill had a “physiological response” while he was filming a sex scene on The Tudors. “It was very embarrassing,” he told Men’s Health back in 2015. “A girl had to be on top of me, she had spectacular breasts, and I hadn’t rearranged my — stuff into a harmless position. She’s basically rubbing herself all over me and, um, it got a bit hard.” Cavill apologized “profusely” for the incident, and called it “not acceptable.” No word on whether he did any push-ups afterwards, although if he did, it might have just have been Superman training.
(Via Us Weekly)