Betty Gilpin Says It Was 'Liberating' to Film Her 'Three Women' Period Sex Scene After Having Her Baby
Betty Gilpin’s taboo-breaking sex scene in the second episode of Three Women wasn’t just a moment of liberation for her character Lina, it was a also a transformative experience for the actress who was a new mom at the time of filming.
In episode two, Lina, a suburban mom whose childhood trauma and marriage to a husband who tells her that kissing her gives him “the heebie-jeebies” has left her disconnected from her sexual desires, finally gets the steamy sex scene she deserves. Lina is menstruating and touch-starved but hungry for intimacy as she reconnects with her high school boyfriend.
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“It was one of my most favorite days on set I’ve ever had,” Gilpin told Marie Claire in a Sept 21 interview. “It was a really profound day at work. We all felt it, and it felt so sort of holy, in a way.”
“Sometimes it can feel like [when shooting] sex scenes you’re sort of treated like a bat that’s flown into the room. The second, ‘cut,’ is yelled, a woman with a tarp comes over and is like, ‘The tarp of shame!’ [and] covers you. You’re like, ‘Sorry, sorry, I did that. Sorry, I was naked.’ Everyone’s like, ‘It’s okay. It’s something we have to do for this piece. It’s over now; just don’t look, look at the ground.’ It felt so the opposite. It felt like group vulnerability in a wonderful communal way.”
Gilpin says that filming the sex scene with Austin Stowell and a prosthetic penis was a “completely new” experience that allowed her to act out a more realistic display for female sexuality, unlike other shoots in which she felt pressured to look or act a certain way.
“The existence of things like period blood and fake penises, I was like, ‘Oh, these are familiar figures to me. I can simulate real sex instead of sterile, unsexy computer sex.'”
“It was my first big part after having had a baby, and certainly my first intimacy scenes after having had a baby” recalled Gilpin, who welcomed her daughter with husband Cosmo Pfeil in 2020, a year before filming the Starz show. “Everyone’s postpartum journey is different, but I definitely felt that there were just things that were different about me physically; my skin was a mess, and my hormones were going crazy.”
The GLOW star says that Three Women was a chance to celebrate the less glossy, aesthetically-appealing aspects of sex.
“When I got to work, ‘Oh, we’re adding stretch marks in makeup. We’re adding a C-section scar. We’re purposefully lighting the scene where I’m trimming my pubic hair in such a way where my tits look worse,'” she says. “It felt like, ‘Oh, we’re all leaning into what real women feel and look like.’ It felt so creatively liberating, and I think that environment is the reason I was able to play the character as fully as I wanted.”
Before you go, click here to see the steamiest sex scenes between older women and younger men.
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