Sex scenes may convince audiences of a glamorous narrative, but the reality is often very, very cringeworthy.
The art of the sex scene has been revolutionised in recent years, with intimacy coaches in high demand to choreograph each move while ensuring the safety of actors.
But the awkwardness that comes with doing a sex scene still lingers, and most actors will agree that simulating sex is one of the trickiest tasks in the business. And the aftermath of embarrassment and nervousness is almost unavoidable.
Read more: 17 terrible performances by great actors
From ‘vag pads’, modesty socks and as Paul Mescal has revealed, a special body gel to mimic fake sweat, the steamy sex scenes audiences see from the comfort of their cinema seats are not the reality for those starring in them.
Most recent TV hits Euphoria, Bridgerton and Normal People have many, many sex scenes. But how do actors react when they reflect back on filming the scenes, or when they first watched them?
Here are eight scenes that even the actors still cringe at:
The Wolf of Wall Street star Margot Robbie was so embarrassed by the sex scenes that she lied to her parents that it was down to CGI. In one scene her character Naomi Lapaglia has sex with the film’s protagonist Jordan Belfort (Leonard DiCaprio) on a bed covered in dollar bills.
“I just flat-out lied to my family for a really long time and I said, ‘I don’t care what you hear; there’s no nudity; I’m not doing any nudity. Ignore anything anyone’s saying; there’s no nudity,” she told the Hollywood Reporter.
“And then I thought, ‘The movie’s going to come out and they’re going to see that there’s nudity,’ so I changed that to, ‘It’s actually a body double and they just CGI’d my head onto someone else.’”
“My family doesn’t have anything to do with the entertainment industry … and they were like, ‘They can do that? And I was like, ‘Oh, technology these days. You wouldn’t believe what they do in Hollywood!”
Starring in Normal People as Connellalongside Daisy Edgar-Jones, Mescal had some hilarious yet awkward moments filming the show. “On the Friday of the first week, me and Daisy had to do a day of sex scenes and we were covered in this gel called Egyptian Magic.”
“It’s basically fake sweat. We had to switch positions and our bodies were in close contact.”
“When we separated, it made a really loud fart noise. Me and Daisy started hysterically laughing, but the crew and director all thought that one of us had farted and really were trying to preserve our dignity,” Mescal told The Mirror.
After Mean Girls star Amanda Seyfriend played the eldest daughter Sarah Hendrickson in HBO’s 2008 series Big Love, she watched the episodes back with her parents and felt horrified when her sex scene finally arrived.
Amanda Seyfried played Sarah Hendrickson in the series Big Love in 2006
“‘I was sitting there watching and all of a sudden, it cut to a scene where two people are having sex, and it’s me! Having sex! I just thought, ‘No, no, no!’” she told The Telegraph.
“‘It was so much more graphic than I remembered. I was horrified.”
TV series Girls star Jemima Kirke found performing orgasms extremely embarrassing but when watching it back, she was proud when it was released in 2012, she says.
“When I do it myself, on set, and I’m doing a real orgasm – not “real,” but the way I know it sounds in real life, because I don’t know how to fake it – I’m embarrassed in front of the cameraman. That’s embarrassing.”
Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar Jones in Normal People
Jemima Kirke played Jessa Johansson in the HBO series Girls
