Three Women’s Betty Gilpin Reveals Episode 7’s Graphic Candy-Coated Sex Scene ‘Was Not A.I.’
Betty Gilpin’s Lina isn’t afraid to get creative in the bedroom — or in this case, the car.
In Episode 7 of Three Women, Starz’s adaptation of Lisa Taddeo’s bestselling nonfiction book, Lina gets crafty during her affair with her former high school flame, Aidan (played by NCIS: Origins’ Austin Stowell). The pair meet in a parking lot and things quickly get streamy in Lina’s four-door sedan, where viewers are treated to a kind of intimacy rarely seen on TV.
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“I’ve done lots of sex scenes before,” Gilpin tells TVLine. “And I think I’ve always had a sort of practical, sort of shrugging realism about them… And my job as a woman in these is to lie, basically, and look as porny and small and young and shiny as possible.”
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Gilpin explains the usual sex scene process as an all-hands-on-deck effort to “help cover my zits, and light me and hide me in a way where I look like the music video version of myself.”
In Three Women, however, Gilpin’s experience has been different. “This was so the opposite of that. [Three Women is] about female desire, so obviously the sex scenes — they didn’t even feel like that — they felt like real scenes, and some of the most important scenes in the show.”
Gilpin goes on to call Three Women’s approach to intimacy, “beautiful,” “explorative” and “interesting.”
While we’re loving this fresh take on female desire, it’s hard to watch Episode 7 — the moment when Lina cracks open a caramel-filled chocolate and massages the contents onto Aidan’s penis — and not wonder: Um… how? The camera closes in on the act, carefully tracking the motion of Lina’s hands in a way that is startling, but not altogether unfamiliar. It’s similar to the way a camera might pan and linger upon certain parts of a scantily clad woman — but we’ve never seen the male gaze turned so directly inward… and for so long. What are the mechanics of such a scene? Could it have been A.I.?
“No, it was not A.I. No way! F–k A.I.,” Gilpin reveals.
Hit PLAY on the video above to watch Gilpin talk more about intimacy in Three Women, then hit the comments with your thoughts: Did Episode 7 leave you absolutely aghast?!
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