Getting naked and making out with your co-worker while a bunch of people watch and film does not sound like a normal experience — but for many actors, it’s just part of the job. And some of them have some pretty wild tales to tell about it…
1.
Long before Adam Brody and Kristen Bell starred in Nobody Wants This, they played love interests on House of Lies and filmed a sex scene while Kristen was heavily pregnant in real life — leading Adam Brody to jokingly refer to the scene as “our threesome”, according to Kristen.
2.
Heated Rivalry got everyone talking about its steamy scenes — including star Hudson Williams, who plays Shane. He shared that during the first sex scene he filmed with Connor Storrie, who plays Ilya, he got stomach pain from being “slammed” after rejecting a crash pad.
3.
Andrew Garfield revealed that he and Florence Pugh got so into a sex scene while filming We Live in Time, they didn’t hear “cut” and kept going after they needed to.
4.
Nicole Kidman said she felt “exposed” but safe with director Halina Reijn while filming the sex scenes in erotic thriller Babygirl, adding that it left her “ragged”.
5.
Emilia Clarke had to do a lot of sex scenes during her time as Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones. In 2019, she told Dax Shepard she felt like she was “floating through” it all while filming Season 1.
6.
Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson filmed a lot of sex scenes together for the erotic Fifty Shades trilogy, and Dakota shared that they’re “never easy” and “it’s not fun”. She revealed that the hardest scene to film was when her character Ana is handcuffed and blindfolded in Fifty Shades Freed.
7.
Rosamund Pike told Seth Meyers her sex scene with Neil Patrick Harris in Gone Girl was an “odd experience”, but it was rehearsing it for two hours on a sound stage alone at director David Fincher’s request that was what really felt “highly inappropriate.”
8.
Judy Greer was another actor who found a sex scene rehearsal excruciating — even though she went into it with confidence. She told People that while rehearsing a sex scene with Woody Harrelson for the movie Wilson, her performance got a little too enthusiastic.
9.
Woody Harrelson, meanwhile, was once very candid about his intimate scenes with Demi Moore for 1993’s Indecent Proposal, and Demi also opened up about her experience on the erotic drama.
10.
Daniel Radcliffe said that Kill Your Darlings director John Krokidas gave him a lot of “graphic detail” and “step-by-step instructions” to prepare him for the movie’s sex scene. “The favorite note I have ever had was when we were kissing and the director shouted, ‘Not like that. Crazy sex kissing!'”
11.
The always-candid Robert Pattinson described his sex scene with Julianne Moore in Maps to the Stars, as “so funny” because they had only just met before filming it — and he got extremely sweaty.
12.
Lena Dunham created and starred in Girls, and in 2012 told Conan O’Brien about her conflicting feelings around the show’s sex scenes: “I will be lying there, kind of being slammed by a naked body, thinking, ‘I want out of this bed. I want out of this scene. I want out of this life. Who did this to me?’ And I realized, I’m my own boss. I’ve written it. I’m directing it. I’m the person holding myself in sexual slavery.”
13.
Ryan Guzman starred opposite Jennifer Lopez in The Boy Next Door, and told People he put too much “oomph” into a scene where he had to lift her, sending her into the ceiling. Perhaps worse, though, was his dad’s reaction when watching the steamy scene: “My dad went into a theater full of all my friends and family back home in Sacramento. Right around that part in the movie, he decided to get up and yell out, ‘That’s my boy!'”
14.
Riley Keough told Seth Meyers that her husband had a cameo in a sex scene with her for Daisy Jones & The Six, but their real-life relationship actually made filming it more awkward.
15.
Peter Sarsgaard filmed a sex scene with Jessie Buckley for The Lost Daughter — but what made it unusual was that his wife, Maggie Gyllenhaal, was the director — something which he told NME he “recommends”.
16.
In 2011 while promoting Mildred Pierce, Kate Winslet said that filming sex scenes is “profoundly bizarre” and that she hates it.
17.
Ben Affleck wrote, directed and starred in Live by Night, which features a montage of sex scenes between his character Joe Coughlin and Sienna Miller’s character Emma Gould. This required hours and hours of shooting, which Sienna told E! she found “hysterical”, at one point laughing so hard she had to leave the room.
18.
Dave Franco told E! his Neighbors sex scene with Halston Sage was his first time showing his butt on screen, describing it as “nerve-wracking” and “awkward”.
19.
And finally, Margot Robbie shared that during filming a sex scene for The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio, she wound up with the actor’s e-cigarette in her butt crack.
And if I wasn’t already convinced I could never be an actor, I am now.