Do you ever see a nude scene in a TV show or movie and think, “How the hell do they feel comfortable doing that?” Well, these actors have opened up about what shooting nude scenes is really like, and they have some wild tales to tell. Here’s the good, the bad, and the downright awful…
1.
Emilia Clarke’s breakout role as Daenerys on Game of Thrones involved a lot of nudity from the very first episode, and she has since been open about the fact that she wasn’t always comfortable with it. Speaking to Dax Shepard on his Armchair Expert podcast, Emilia said being new to the industry at the time really put her at a disadvantage. “I’ve been on a film set twice before then, and now I’m on a film set, completely naked, with all of these people — and I don’t know what I’m meant to do, and I don’t know what’s expected of me, and I don’t know what you want, and I don’t know what I want.”
“I’m a lot more savvy with what I’m comfortable with, and what I am okay with doing,” she said. “I’ve had fights on set before where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up,’ and they’re like, ‘You don’t wanna disappoint your Game of Thrones fans.’ And I’m like, ‘Fuck you.'”
2.
Heated Rivalry is famous for its many steamy scenes that required a lot of nudity from leads Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie. Hudson told Variety the pair were very comfortable with each other — to the point where he told the intimacy coordinator he didn’t need a “crash pad” to cushion his naked body against Connor’s thrusts during a sex scene. “I was like, ‘I’m good, I’m tough. I’m comfortable, cozy,'” he said. “But he starts going and male genitalia is very obtrusive. It’s not discreet. We start filming, and it’s crashing into my balls, and he starts slamming me. My stomach is in a twisting pain. So that was the only part that I was like, ‘Fuck, that kind of hurt.'”
Hudson said his main concern with doing the nude scenes was not his own comfort, but that of everyone else on set. “It was more like, how do I not make people on set uncomfortable. I don’t want to be here with my butthole in the air and then make a grip uncomfortable when they come to fix a light,” he said. “But once I found out they were so warm and really passionate about the show, I didn’t have to tiptoe, and I was very comfortable getting naked.”
3.
Amanda Seyfried has said that when she was starting out as an actor, she did nude scenes she wasn’t comfortable with because she didn’t feel like she had much choice. “Being 19, walking around without my underwear on — like, are you kidding me? How did I let that happen? Oh, I know why. I was 19 and I didn’t want to upset anybody, and I wanted to keep my job. That’s why.”
Amanda has done nude scenes since, including in Chloe with Julianne Moore, and seems to have become more comfortable setting boundaries for herself. She recently told BBC Radio that for new movie The Testament of Ann Lee she had a “prosthetic butthole” to protect herself. “This movie, it needed to be graphic so, like, I had a prosthetic butthole… It was cool, it was exciting. I was pregnant and naked but I wasn’t naked at all. And at the end of the movie I’m standing in front of a burning building with just a merkin. I felt so free.” She added, “You cannot see my butthole in it, but I swear there is a prosthetic butthole there… just in case.”
4.
Amanda’s Chloe co-star Julianne Moore has done a number of nude scenes throughout her career, and said it’s always an uncomfortable experience. “Somebody asked me, ‘How do you become comfortable?’ And I’m like, ‘You don’t. Nobody’s comfortable,'” she shared. She added that nude scenes can be necessary when the story calls for it. “If suddenly somebody’s sitting there all covered up at home, you’re sending a signal to my brain that this isn’t true and you’re taking [viewers] out of the story.”
She also laughed off the idea that her kids will find her on-screen nudity confronting, saying, “I am aware that my kids will one day see my films and might think they are a bit shocking, especially the nude scenes. But, hey, there is always a point in a kid’s life when they hate their mother!”
5.
Halle Berry’s star was already well on the rise when she did her first nude scene for Swordfish, and she said it was only because of her success that she felt comfortable going topless on screen. “So much of my life I was afraid to [do a nude scene]. With the success of my Dorothy Dandridge project and the critical acclaim that brought me, I finally felt that I didn’t have to prove myself anymore.”
Halle said from there she felt she had “nothing to lose” going nude in Monster’s Ball, saying that while she considered it was make or break for her career, “If this ends my career, then I’m ending my own career on my own beliefs.” Speaking of filming the scene, Halle said, “We only had to do it one time, which is good, because you don’t really want to have to go there that many times.”
6.
Sharon Stone claimed in her memoir The Beauty of Living Twice that her infamous nude scene in Basic Instinct — in which her character uncrosses her legs and flashes her genitals — was actually not consensual. She said while filming the scene, she was told to remove her underwear because it was “reflecting the light,” but was assured nothing could be seen. She only realized it was a full-frontal shot of her vulva when she was shown the movie for the first time in a room full of other people.
She said she immediately slapped the director, Paul Verhoeven, and then called her lawyer, who assured her the shot wasn’t legal and the film couldn’t be released with it in. While she was initially relieved, Sharon claims after some serious thought, she decided to leave the scene as is. “I thought and thought and I chose to allow this scene in the film. Why? Because it was correct for the film and for the character; and because, after all, I did it.”
7.
While promoting the movie Under the Skin, Scarlett Johansson said she always considers if nude scenes are worth it, because “you look at the nudity and you assume it’s going to be a screenshot for someone.” She added, “You kind of have to weigh the value of the risk you are taking, is this gratuitous? Is this a vanity project, or is this an important part of this character’s journey to self discovery… I’m not a provocative person. It’s not like I live to be photographed in the buff or anything like that.”
8.
Jason Segel fought to have his character appear full frontal nude in Forgetting Sarah Marshall because he wanted the scene to be “hilarious” and “the most humiliating breakup of all time.” He said he was “not very uncomfortable” while filming, adding, “I really felt free.” It was a less positive experience for his mother, who Jason pranked by “surprising” her with the nude scene at the movie’s premiere — she walked out of the theater in tears and then sent an email to his entire family to warn them.
9.
Leonardo DiCaprio has done several nude scenes over the course of his career. Speaking of his scenes in The Wolf of Wall Street, he told Extra, “It was all me, pal… all the flopping around, everything, it was all me.” He added, “When you take on a character like this and you want to accurately reflect the nature of who these people are, you just gotta do it. You can’t think about yourself, because it’s not me, it’s a depiction of somebody else.”
10.
Speaking of her own experience doing The Wolf of Wall Street nude scenes, Leo’s co-star Margot Robbie said she had actually rejected director Martin Scorsese’s offer to wear a robe at one stage, insisting the character should be naked. “That’s not what she would do in that scene,” she said. “The whole point is that she’s going to come out completely naked—that’s the card she’s playing.” But Margot revealed in an interview with BAFTA that she was still very nervous and had to take a couple of shots of tequila before filming.
Speaking another time to Vanity Fair, Margot said that filming nudity and sex scenes is “so awkward,” especially with a “ton of people” watching, but you just have to get through them. “It’s just like, this is what you need to do — get on with it,” she said. “The sooner you do it, the sooner you can stop doing it.” She also shared that during one take for a sex scene in The Wolf of Wall Street, Leo’s e-cigarette accidentally wound up in her butt crack.
11.
Glen Powell did his first nude scene in Anyone But You, and told Variety, “You just have to grip it and rip it on a scene like that. You know you’re not going to leave that filming day looking cool, so you just have to embrace it.” He added, “Taking your clothes off on the side of a cliff in a hurry is not safe either. Nobody talks about that safety issue on set, where I almost died falling off a cliff taking my pants off too fast. But it’s a really fun scene, so it was all worth it.”
12.
Emma Stone didn’t do nude scenes for much of her career, and it was a somewhat spontaneous choice to do her first one in The Favourite, which was directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and also starred Olivia Colman. “I had the sheet up around me, and as we were shooting it and we did a few takes, I said, ‘Can I please just be [naked]?'” Emma told The Hollywood Reporter. “Olivia was like, ‘No, don’t do it!’ Yorgos was like, ‘Are you sure that’s what you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘Absolutely.’ I chose to do it. I was like, this makes sense to me.”
When it came time to do more nude scenes in another Yorgos Lanthimos film, Poor Things, Emma said it felt like a necessary part of her character’s journey, highlighting that the film had an “incredible” intimacy coordinator, and that in some ways the sex scenes were “the easiest part because that was choreographed.”
13.
It’s no wonder Olivia Colman was protective of Emma Stone on The Favourite, considering she had a traumatic experience filming Confetti early in her career. In the movie, she plays a naturist and has a number of full frontal nude scenes — which, she claims, she was told would be pixelated in the final film, and they weren’t. “It was the worst experience of my life,” she told the Guardian. “I now never trust anybody. I love people, I believe in the goodness of people, but ever since that, there’s a bit of me that died… The betrayal was how much was going to be seen and what was going to be pixelated… I didn’t sleep for a year.”
More recently on Good Hang with Amy Poehler, Olivia said that the thing that scares her the most in acting is, “Anything where I have to show any skin.” She added, “I don’t like [it]. No thank you. Or pretending to have sex with someone. I don’t like it… Thank god for intimacy coordinators.”
14.
Mary-Louise Parker had to be naked on camera for a number of scenes during her time as the lead character of Weeds, and she says she was mostly fine with it — with one major exception, which was a scene where her character, Nancy, was in a bathtub. “I didn’t think I needed to be naked. I fought with the director about it, and now I am bitter. I knew it was going to be on the Internet: ‘Mary Louise shows off her big nipples.’ I wish I hadn’t done that. I was goaded into it.”
15.
Bradley Cooper did full frontal nudity in Nightmare Alley, which he starred in alongside Toni Colette. “I can still remember that day, just to be naked in front of the crew for six hours,” he said. “And it was Toni Collette’s first day. It was just like, ‘whoa.’ It was pretty heavy.”
16.
Kate Winslet has never shied away from nude scenes, including famously in her breakout role in Titanic, after which she was subjected to “the most awful scrutiny and judgment,” she told Vogue. She said she now knows “better than to waste precious energy on criticizing my physical self.”
Even still, she said she had to be “really fucking brave” when it came to filming nude scenes in more recent movie Lee, because her body was its “softest version” and she didn’t want to hide from that. “And believe me, people amongst our own team would say, ‘You might just want to sit up a bit.’ And I’d go, ‘Why? [Because of] the bit of flesh you can see? No, that’s the way it’s going to be!'”
17.
Barry Keoghan does an iconic nude dance in the final scene of Saltburn, and laughed off suggestions he’d worn a prosthetic penis while filming. “It was all me, you know,” he said on The Louis Theroux Podcast. “It was a thing that I didn’t really bat an eyelid to, you know, I would bat an eyelid if it didn’t fit the story.” He added, “My hesitation was the dancing. I don’t like dancing.”
18.
Paul Mescal’s breakout role in Normal People involved full frontal nudity, and he told the Mirror, “I wouldn’t liked to have done the show without nudity in it, because the book is so visceral and raw. When I read the book, the characters are clearly naked in my head so I knew that was going to be the case when I got the part.”
He added, “Do I have to get naked? Yeah, absolutely fine. Do I want screenshots all over the internet? Probably not, but that’s ultimately something I can’t control.”
19.
After her personal nude photos were leaked as part of a hack in 2014, Jennifer Lawrence said she felt violated. She avoided doing any nude scenes, but eventually decided to do one while filming Red Sparrow. “Red Sparrow really scared the hell out of me because I get nude,” she told Vanity Fair. “I tried to do the movie without nudity but realized it just wouldn’t be right to put the character through something that I, myself, am not willing to go through.” She added, “My biggest fear was that people would say, ‘Oh, how can you complain about the hack if you’re going to get nude anyway? [But] one is my choice.”
Jennifer said it was the right choice for her. “I got something back that was taken from me, and it also felt normal,” she said, adding that director Francis Lawrence really put her at ease. “He looked me right in the eyes like I had clothes on and then all of a sudden I was like, ‘Oh, O.K., it’s just like I have clothes on.’ Everybody here is professional. You’re still at work. One look just made me comfortable. It didn’t make me feel naked.”
20.
Chris Pine made headlines when he did full frontal nudity in Outlaw King, which he didn’t seem to love. “There’s so much beheading in this, and yet people want to talk about my penis,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I think that says something about our society, where people can get disemboweled, but it’s the man’s junk that is of interest.” He added that the scene was shot on “the side of a major highway” and it was “very cold,” which was “not exactly the elements I would choose myself.”
“I wouldn’t obviously do it if I didn’t feel it was important,” Chris went on. “We’re just base animals. I thought it was very important to see this man who’s going to have power be an animal.”
21.
And finally, Colin Farrell first went fully nude for Tigerland, and has said he was very nervous about it. “I went up to the director Joel Schumacher and I had on a dressing gown and nothing underneath. And I was obviously so nervous that I lost my mind for a second cause I opened my dressing gown and I said, ‘It’s a bit, is it a bit…’ Cause I had, like most men, what you could refer to as ‘retro bush.'” After consulting with Joel, Colin decided to give himself a trim using beard trimmers her borrowed from the hair and makeup department.
“I went into my trailer and I got a bin and I put it there. And I sat over the bin and I got the beard trimmer — I was nervous — and I trimmed the right side a little bit and obviously had to match it, so I trimmed the left but I overshot the mark a little bit,” Colin said. “So I had to go back in and trim the right again, and I overshot that. At this stage I was sweating and I went back in… and I looked down and I had a little landing strip.” Colin added that shooting nudity and sex scenes is “always uncomfortable.”