17 Actors Who Say They Were Pressured To Film Nude And Sex Scenes That They Weren't Comfortable With
You may have been seeing a lot of claims about Sam Levinson writing unnecessary nude scenes in Euphoria in the news recently.
Stars Sydney Sweeney, Minka Kelly, and Chloe Cherry have all spoken about being uncomfortable with nude scenes in scripts for Season 2, and asking showrunner, Sam Levinson, to change them. In all cases, he did.*
*It was actually not Cherry, but costar, Tyler Chase, who spoke out against the nudity in the proposed scene and caused Levinson to take it out, but Cherry has said publicly that she was also uncomfortable with it.
Luckily, in these cases, the actors were listened to and the scenes were changed. But it's the unfortunate reality that many actors are pushed into doing nude and sex scenes they're not comfortable with. Others may not feel comfortable advocating for themselves, or may not even know they're able to ask for the scenes to be changed, or to request body doubles.
By current SAG-AFTRA standards (which covers essentially all major television shows and films), producers are supposed to tell actors about any expected nude/sex scenes before their audition, get written consent for these kinds of scenes, and have a closed set when nude/sex scenes are filmed.
Here are 17 actors who were reportedly pressured into doing sex or nude scenes, were not made aware of their rights in filming the scenes, or felt manipulated and misled about the nature of the scenes.
Back in 2017, cast and crew members of the teen drama One Tree Hill wrote an open letter accusing showrunner, Mark Schwann, of sexual harassment. Representatives for Schwann have still not commented on these allegations. Later, stars Hilarie Burton and Sophia Bush would both detail scenes they were uncomfortable doing, but had to do anyways.
1.One such moment was a Season 1 scene where Peyton unbuttons Lucas' shirt and kisses his stomach. Hilarie Burton, who played Peyton, found the scene "inappropriate" and "unnecessary." She filmed the scene because she felt she "couldn't question it," though she did insist on doing three takes or less.
"I was, like, crying in my trailer. I'm like, 'I don't want to do this,'" Hilarie said on an episode of the One Tree Hill podcast, Drama Queens. "'It feels dirty. It feels like they're trying to sex everything up.'"
2.Sophia Bush has also claimed that, as young actors, they were taken advantage of by adults on set who knew they didn't know what they were doing. She said that, after being pushed into multiple scenes with her character Brooke in her underwear, she insisted her boss stop writing these scenes.
"We didn't get to grow up on a set where people wanted to answer our questions or help us navigate any of the madness of the early aughts," Sophia also said of her time on the show. "Looking back on it, we can see the ways in which we were fetishized. We had this lens of adultification put over us — this idea that we were supposed to know everything and have answers, and be, ultimately, professional when we didn't even know what the technical terms were. ... We had grown-ups who we trusted, who now we understand were being really controlling and manipulative."
3.In the movie, Last Tango in Paris, there is a scene in which Maria Schneider's character is raped using a stick of butter as lubricant. Not only was this scene not in the original script Schneider had signed onto, but she was not told about the butter.
Schneider described feeling humiliated and "a little raped," calling director, Bernardo Bertolucci, manipulative.
Bertolucci later admitted to not telling Schneider about the butter because he wanted Schneider's humiliation to appear real, and he said he felt guilty, but didn't regret his actions because "you have to be completely free" as a filmmaker.
4.Similarly, Thandiwe Newton was not told the details of what would happen in the sexual assault scene in Crash, directed by Paul Haggis, until just before filming it.
Upon hearing what the scene would entail, she returned to her trailer and cried because she wasn't comfortable with the depiction. "I was really worried, and I was upset," Newton told Vulture. "Not that I had to do the scene, but I was upset that I had no idea that that’s what we were going to be conveying in the movie."
Haggis has not appeared to comment on Newton's allegations.
One particularly famous sex scene occurs in lesbian romance film, Blue Is the Warmest Color, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche.
5.Star Léa Seydoux said the sex scene in the film took 10 days to film, and called filming "humiliating." The other star, Adèle Exarchopoulos, talked about how director, Kechiche, "really wanted us to give him everything. Most people don’t even dare to ask the things that he did, and they’re more respectful — you get reassured during sex scenes, and they’re choreographed, which desexualizes the act."
Seydoux also talked about how in France, the director has all the power, and "in a way you’re trapped."
After French film union, Spiac-CGT, released a statement alleging that director Abdellatif Kechiche violated labor laws and bullied crew members on the set, stars Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos talked with the Daily Beast about the horrible shooting conditions. Kechiche responded to these claims on numerous occasions, calling Seydoux an "arrogant, spoiled child" and criticizing her for speaking out about how difficult filming was.
"How indecent to talk about pain when doing one of the best jobs in the world... How, when you are adored, when you go up on red carpet, when we receive awards, how we can speak of suffering?" he said. He also accused her of radically changing her attitude towards him after filming, saying she appeared quite happy at Cannes: “If Seydoux lived such a bad experience, why did she come to Cannes, try on robes and jewelry all day? Is she an actress or an artist of the red carpet?”
6.Emilia Clarke said she felt coerced into a "fuck-ton" of nudity in the first season of Game of Thrones. She called the scenes "terrifying," and said that since she was very fresh out of drama school, she just assumed that because the nude scenes were in the script, they were needed.
"I’d been on a film set twice before then, and I’m now 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," Clarke said.
Game of Thrones writers did not appear to comment on Clarke's comments. Clarke did emphasize that costar, Jason Momoa, helped make her feel safe in their love scenes, showing her how they were supposed to go and demanding proper treatment for Clarke.
Her character did not appear nude for a few seasons (Seasons 4 and 5), and she would go on to appear nude again in Season 6, saying she was proud of the scene.
7.Jessica Brown Findlay also filmed a frontal nudity scene in Albatross that she was not comfortable with, saying she was "naive" and hadn't realized she could say no. I had no idea what was going to happen and thought I was going to be shot from behind.”
8.This doesn't just happen to women, either. In Along Came Polly, Ben Stiller was uncomfortable with his character's nude scene. Director John Hamburg reportedly agreed to cut the scene if audiences didn't find it funny. "Later, I discovered I could have had a bottom double — but no one had bothered to tell me," Stiller added, after his nude scene ended up in the final film.
9.Mary Louise Parker often had nude and sex scenes in the Showtime show, Weeds, but there was one she didn't like involving being nude in a bathtub. "I didn't think I needed to be naked, and I fought with the director about it, and now I'm bitter," she said. "I knew it was going to be on the internet: 'Mary-Louise Parker shows off her big nipples.' I wish I hadn't done that. I was goaded into it."
Many articles about Parker's refusal also seemed pretty derisive, focusing on her use of the word bitter in headlines, emphasizing that she thought she looked okay for her age, and assuring her that the scene did, in fact, have to be nude. This basically served to prove Parker's point.
The show’s co-executive producer, Roberto Benabib, argued it was necessary for the scene, as it illustrated Nancy’s vulnerability. He said, “there was a nonchalance to the nudity that informed the scene.”
10.Sharon Stone didn't know how explicit her Basic Instinct interrogation scene would be, and says she was misled into showing more than she was comfortable with.
According to Stone, director Paul Verhoeven told her to take off her underwear as it was shown in the scene, assuring her she wouldn't be exposed and showing her on the monitor in low-definition that she wasn't. However, when she saw it in theaters, she realized that she was.
Afterwards, Stone said, "I went in the booth and I slapped [Paul Verhoeven] and I said, ‘You could have shown me this to me by myself.’”
11.Similarly, Benita Robledo pushed back against a full frontal nudity scene in Dependent's Day. She says the director, Michael David Lynch, allowed her to shoot two versions — one framed so that she was exposed and one framed so that she wasn't — so they could decide together which to use later. But the conversation never occurred, and when she went to see a screening, he'd used the exposed version without consulting her.
When she emailed him upset, he called her. "He's screaming at me that I'm stealing his movie from him, and he says, 'You shouldn't be upset, because guys were asking me at the screening for your number because they wanted to fuck you.'" Months later, he finally agreed to shoot a third version on the scene in which she wore a t-shirt.
In response to these allegations, which Lynch denied, he said that the nude scene was in the script and that Robledo wanted to do it, and that she was misremembering what he'd said. "During the creative process, there are always going to be emotional conversations and disagreements," he added.
12.Harvey Weinstein allegedly told Salma Hayek he was going to shut down production on Frida because the only thing she had going for her was sex appeal and there wasn't any in the movie. He then said that he would let her finish the film if she agreed to do a sex scene with another woman and did full-frontal nudity.
"It was clear to me he would never let me finish this movie without him having his fantasy one way or another. There was no room for negotiation. I had to say yes." Hayek wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times. "So many years of my life had gone into this film. We were about five weeks into shooting, and I had convinced so many talented people to participate. How could I let their magnificent work go to waste?"
She agreed to do the sex scene, and had a nervous breakdown on set that required her to take a tranquilizer to get through the scene. "It was not because I would be naked with another woman," she wrote. "It was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein."
Weinstein is currently serving a sentence for rape after a slew of 2017 accusations of sexual abuse.
13.Rebel Wilson was reportedly asked to do full-frontal nudity in The Brothers Grimsby, even though she has a no nudity clause in her contract. When she refused, a body double was used. Wilson's comments suggest that producer, writer, and costar Sacha Baron Cohen still tried to get her to do the scene: "They got her to do all this stuff," Wilson told Marie Claire. "Sacha would go, 'See, she looks good.' I'm like, 'I'm not doing it. I don't care what you say.'"
14.18-year-old actor, Ciera Payton, discovered halfway through her flight to film Flight of Fury in Romania, that she not only had a nude scene in the script, but a sex scene with another woman. She immediately told writer and costar, Steven Seagal, that she was uncomfortable with the scene, to which he allegedly replied, "You won't even show your tits?"
She was sent outside while Seagal gathered other on-set higher-ups, all male, in his trailer, who essentially asked her the same, and said they'd stuck out their necks to hire her. She was able to convince them to allow her to wear a negligee in the shower scene, and she was also clothed for her sex scene, though she said the same all-male group from the trailer choreographed it. "They are choreographing, 'Suck her breast here, kiss her there, pull her hair back," says Payton. "And they keep saying, 'Remember what you're doing, that's good, that's good.' It was so creepy. ... I just felt really (terrible), and very powerless."
Seagal did not return a request for comment and his attorney said "It appears based upon Ms. Payton's assertions, that she did not have to do anything she didn't want to do." Film producers also did not return requests for comments.
15.Rosie Perez did not want to do the nude scene in Do the Right Thing, saying she "didn’t feel good about it because the atmosphere wasn’t correct. And when Spike Lee puts ice cubes on my nipples, the reason you don’t see my head is because I’m crying. I was like, I don’t want to do this." She said she continued because she didn't want to feel "wimpy."
However, Perez did emphasize that she was not forced into doing the scene, and felt violated because she felt she'd violated herself by not standing up for herself. Still, she contrasted her experience with doing nudity in White Men Can't Jump: "It was totally my decision, I felt totally comfortable. The director was so cool and Woody Harrelson was like, Well, whatever you want is cool with me. So there I felt empowered by it."
16.Debra Messing says she was tricked into signing a nudity waiver for her first film out of graduate school, A Walk in the Clouds — producers told her that since the movie was PG-13, they wouldn't be able to do nudity anyways. One day, she showed up to set and they said her nude scene was that day. When she pressed about the PG-13 rating, they said it had a different rating internationally.
When she asked what the angles would be, the director, Alfonso Arau, reportedly said, “How dare you ask me to tell you what my shot is going to be? You are an actress; it’s your job to get naked.” She said she shot the scene anyways because otherwise she'd be fired and this was her "big break." Arau has denied that this happened, saying Messing's claim "had nothing to do with reality.”
17.And finally, Marina Sirtis, best known for her role in Star Trek, has alleged that she was pressured into performing a graphic sex scene by Death Wish 3 director, Michael Winner.
She said in a 2019 interview that she hopes the late director will “rot in hell for all eternity.”
Mar. 10, 2022, at 20:18 PM