33 Actors Reveal What It's Really Like to Shoot a Sex Scene

Jennifer Lawrence, Justin Timberlake and more stars share their experiences on set

By Zach Johnson Jul 29, 2017 2:00 PMTags
Watch: J.Lo Talks Sex Scene for "The Boy Next Door"

Simulating sex is harder than it looks.

Take it from stars like Jennifer Lawrence and Justin Timberlake, who have been frank about the awkward mechanics of filming intimate scenes with other actors. To make the situation more comfortable, most stars request a closed set to keep pervy passersby at bay. Even so, the idea of appearing nude or semi-nude—and engaging in a very personal act—is scary for a lot of stars.

For some actors, like Luke Evans, a little liquor helps to take the edge off. Other actors, like Kirsten Dunst, would rather not dwell on it—so they will "get it done quick" in just a few takes.

So, what's it really like to shoot a sex scene? Here's what 30+ actors have said over the years:

Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl

"It's a very odd experience. Funny enough, when you're actually shooting it and you've got a whole crew around you, it's remarkably normal. However, the odd thing that [director David Fincher] asked us to do was rehearse this scene for two hours, alone, on an empty soundstage—just [Neil Patrick Harris] and myself," she says on Late Night With Seth Meyers. "And that is when it feels highly inappropriate. You are alone with a man who's not your husband—who also has a husband—he's in his underwear, you're in your underwear, and you're sort of dry humping on a bed. No one there's there, so then we think, 'OK, we should be professional about this. We should film this on an iPhone and see how it looks.' Then you watch this thing back and it looks like we're making some sort of super creepy home porn movie."

Justin Timberlake, Friends With Benefits

"It's actually kind of annoying. You're there for 12 hours; it's exhausting," he tells BBC Newsbeat. "All those scenes revolve around the dialogue and physical humor is so tiring."

Amy Schumer, Trainwreck

"I am sort of a boundary-less person, which is something I'm working on. In our house, nudity wasn't a big deal, so that was never an issue for me. It was about the crew. The sex scenes that are funny, I don't care, but the ones that are actually sexual, it's like these people are seeing me be really vulnerable," she tells The New York Times. "Frank, who's holding the boom, is seeing, 'Oh, this is what Amy is like when she really means business.' In between every single take, I think I screamed, 'It's so embarrassing!'"

Michael Fassbender, Shame

"The most important thing is that the other person involved feels safe and doesn't feel like you're taking advantage of them in the scene, 'cause you're revealing a lot, you're going to places where you're vulnerable, and that requires an awful lot of trust," he tells Time Out Chicago. "You talk with your partner and say, 'What are you comfortable with? What are you not comfortable with?' And then you go for it. You try and throw away the safety nets and not worry where the camera's gonna be or how you're gonna look or worry about looking ugly."

Jennifer Lopez, The Boy Next Door

"It was intense," she tells E! News of filming with Ryan Guzman. "Those scenes are embarrassing. They are uncomfortable, but your job as an actress or an actor is to make it believable, and this movie in particular…hinges on if that was believable, that it was enough to make this guy go insane."

Hugh Grant, Four Weddings and a Funeral

"Love scenes are extremely difficult. You're always within a millimeter of sentimentality and yuck," he tells W magazine. "But sex scenes are something else. The conventional response to sex scenes is that they're horrible and not sexy and it's all so unnatural. But I've always found filming sex scenes to be quite a turn-on. I like the experience of being in a sexual position when you're not supposed to be in one."

Mindy Kaling, The Mindy Project

"There must be lots of other actors who love doing sex scenes too, right? Wrong. If you interview any actor about having to do sex scenes, you always the same answer: they 'hate' doing them. I am here to tell you they are all lying. Every last one of 'em," she writes in Why Not Me?, a collection of essays. "Obviously on-screen sex is not actual penetrative sex, but as any religious high-schooler will tell you, simulating sex can be pretty damn enjoyable as well."

Jake Gyllenhaal, Love & Other Drugs

"It's not awkward; it's our job," he tells On Air With Ryan Seacrest of starring opposite Anne Hathaway. "That's the tough life of being an actor in the movie business nowadays. It's exhausting."

Jennifer Lawrence, Passengers

"I got really, really drunk. But then that led to more anxiety when I got home because I was like, 'What have I done? I don't know,'" she tells The Hollywood Reporter of working with Chris Pratt. "And he was married. And it was going to be my first time kissing a married man, and guilt is the worst feeling in your stomach. And I knew it was my job, but I couldn't tell my stomach that. So I called my mom, and I was like, 'Will you just tell me it's OK?' It was just very vulnerable. And you don't know what's too much. You want to do it real, you want everything to be real, but then...That was the most vulnerable I've ever been."

Ashton Kutcher, No Strings Attached

"I just start by apologizing. I think somebody told me—and I'm not sure who the actor was; I think it was Sir Laurence Olivier who said it...I think he said something to the effect of, 'I apologize if I get aroused and I apologize if I do not get aroused.' And you have to say it with the accent if you do it," he tells NBC Bay Area. "But there is sort of always this awkward state of, 'Is this OK? Is that OK?' And then in between, it's like, just, 'Let's act like nothing happened.' And then you see how good of an actor you really are."

Dakota Johnson, Fifty Shades of Grey

"There's a scene in which Christian uses a flogger on Anastasia," she tells TIME of working with Jamie Dornan. "Filming a sex scene is not a sensual or pleasurable environment. It's really hot—not in a steamy, sexual way. It's just sweaty and it's not very comfortable. And on top of that, my hands and legs were tied, and I was blindfolded, and I was being hit with this bizarre tool."

Ryan Reynolds, The Change-Up

"In the scene, she's sitting there and I take her top off and the bra off, and she has those pasties on, but she's drawn these adorable little smiley faces on them," he says of co-star Olivia Wilde during an appearance on The Tonight Show. "And I forget every line in the scene—not just from this movie but from every other movie I've done. I take my hands away and I look down at my hands and there's two frickin' smiley faces on them and I have no idea what to do. The scene is over now...And I reflexively, like an idiot, just put my hands right back on her breasts. And I think I'm doing it to cover them up, but I'm realizing now that it's a very fine line between chivalry and, you know, workplace sexual assault."

Issa Rae, Insecure

"For HBO, we have so much license to show black people loving and f--king. Why wouldn't we take advantage of that? We don't get to see black lust in a normalized and natural way that isn't hyper-sexualized," she tells Cosmopolitan. "Young black people have sex. Sometimes it's good sex, sometimes it's bad sex, sometimes it's revenge sex. There's so many different facets. It's such a privilege to show that and it feels so real. The writer in me is always excited to write those scenes. The performer is like, 'Oh, s--t. Why the f--k did I write this because I got to do it?'"

James McAvoy, Wanted

"It's sweaty and uncomfortable. My paranoia is, the girl I'm doing the sex scene with will think I'm getting off on her," he tells The Daily Record. "I have nightmares about that."

Kristen Stewart, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2

"I only hate them when they're contrived," she tells Harper's Bazaar U.K. "On Twilight we had to do the most epic sex scene of all time. It had to be transcendent and otherworldly, inhuman, better sex than you can possibly ever imagine, and we were like, 'How do we live up to that?' It was agony. Which sucks, because I wanted it to be so good."

Dave Franco, Neighbors

"I was pretty nervous for the scene," he says on Chelsea Lately of hooking up with Halston Sage's character. "I met the girl the day before and she was beautiful and very sweet, but it's awkward. You meet each other and then you're grinding—you don't even know her name, barely. You have 20 crew members who are also watching you do it. And then, of course, for me, I woke up that morning and I had a giant pimple on my ass...It sucks, right? I had to go to the makeup artist who I had also met that week and be like, 'Can we go in the other room and you'll put makeup literally on my ass?' So, that was that."

Mila Kunis, Black Swan

"It's hard to have a sex scene, period. It doesn't matter if it's a friend, a male, a female. You're with 100-something crew members, lighting you, re-positioning you," she tells The Huffington Post. "There's no comfort whatsoever."

Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Dracula

"I'm never wearing underpants when I do those sex scenes," he tells The Evening Standard. "I'm always half naked. Sex scenes, first of all, are very easy to do, because you're usually given somebody to work with who is very beautiful and attractive, so that makes it much easier, do you know what I mean? I'm telling you, you do two days of shooting sex scenes on a film set, you'll be exhausted after it. You'll get back to your partner, you won't wanna touch them. You'll be like, 'I just wanna have a bath.'"

Viola Davis, How to Get Away With Murder

"If I'm in a sex scene, I want to play the sex scene. I want to say, 'This is why I'm attracted to you. It's gotten to this point. This is what my body looks like,'" she tells Variety. "I saw it as an opportunity way bigger than doing good work. I saw it as an opportunity for a dark-skinned actress of 50 to be in a role that's sexualized, not sexy. There's a difference between sexualized and sexy."

Ryan Gosling, Blue Valentine

"Actors become very professional and proficient about watching out for each other's light and not stepping on each other's lines. All of these things are artificial, and you have to strip that away if you're going to achieve a sense of intimacy," he tells W magazine of shooting opposite Michelle Williams. "In real life sex is messy, and we wanted to get at that wonderful messiness."

Natalie Dormer, Game of Thrones

"Anyone who says they're laid back about sex scenes is a fibber. It never gets any less…not traumatic, that's the wrong word…not embarrassing…it can be a bit awkward," she tells Women's Health. "The choreography of sex scenes is so unsexy and un-glamourous. It's all about camera angles; you have to recreate the moment so many times. It's just timing and technical."

Henry Cavill, The Tudors

"You don't think of sex scenes as showing your bum to the nation," he tells Men's Fitness. "It's actually acutely uncomfortable being naked in a roomful of people. The very last thing it is is sexy. The actual physicality is very uncomfortable. All you're doing is smacking your nuts against someone, and nothing is going in...[One time,] a girl had to be on top of me, she had spectacular breasts, and I hadn't rearranged my stuff into a harmless position. She's basically rubbing herself all over me and, um, it got a bit hard. I had to apologize profusely afterward. It's not great when you're in a professional acting environment and somebody gets a boner, is it? No, not acceptable."

Margot Robbie, The Wolf of Wall Street

"There isn't an option," she tells Vanity Fair. "It's just like, 'This is what you need to do. Get on with it.' The sooner you do it, the sooner you can stop doing it. It's so awkward."

Charlie Hunnam, Sons of Anarchy

"I try to be sensitive to the fact that we're doing something intimate, but also keep a clear boundary. Because I'm in a very committed relationship, and I'm also cognizant that it's not my girlfriend's favorite part of my job. It's a delicate balance to strike—to be emotionally open enough to have an experience that feels honest between two people but also maintain that it's just for the film. It's not my favorite thing to do. I'm also a germophobe," he tells Elle. I've been profoundly germophobic since I was a young child. I don't want to kiss anyone but my girlfriend for my whole life."

Lena Dunham, Girls

"I stopped wearing the nude patch after the first season of Girls. There's not one guy who works on that show who hasn't seen the inside of my vagina," she tells The Hollywood Reporter. "I used to wear this patch, but...This patch—you glue it over your vagina. It gets sweaty and always falls off. My male co-stars, at the end of the day, don't care... I never understand when people say, 'Sex scenes are so mechanical; it doesn't feel like anything.' It feels like someone f--king you! It's confusing."

Jon Hamm, Bridesmaids

"It's like running in the rain. There's a certain point where you go, 'F--k it, I'm already wet. I'm not going to get any less wet so I might as well enjoy how this feels,'" he tells Playboy of his onscreen romp with Kristen Wiig's character. "I mean, sure, there's an awkwardness about being in a weird flesh-colored thong, bouncing on top of an actress. And I am not a small human being. I weigh at least 200 pounds and I'm 6-foot-2. And Wiig is a twig; she's a skinny little thing. I told her, 'Just punch me in the side if I'm hurting you.' It's weird and uncomfortable at first but then all the awkwardness melts away and you think, 'All right, we're doing this, so let's have fun with it.'"

Emilia Clarke, Game of Thrones

"It's brilliant. I actually went up to [co-creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss] and thanked them. I was like, 'That's a scene I've been waiting for!'" she tells Elle of her Season 4 tryst with Michael Huisman's character. "Because I get a lot of crap for having done nudes scenes and sex scenes. That, in itself, is so antifeminist. Women hating on other women is just the problem. That's upsetting, so it's kind of wonderful to have a scene where I was like, 'There you go!'"

Liam Hemsworth, The Dressmaker

"It's always pretty awkward when you have to take off your pants in front of the crew and other actors and all that stuff. During the scene, it's fine. You don't feel uncomfortable whilst the cameras are rolling," he tells E! News. "As soon as it's 'cut,' and you're standing around and you're in your underwear, chatting to the crew, that's when it's weird and uncomfortable."

Nicole Kidman, Big Little Lies

"I remember lying on the floor in the bathroom...and I just wouldn't get up in-between takes," she tells W of the limited series' seventh episode. "I was just lying there, sort of broken and crying, and I remember at one point [director Jean-Marc Vallée] coming over and just sort of placing a towel over me because I was just lying there in half-torn underwear and just basically on the ground with nothing on and I was just, like [gasps]."

Luke Evans, The Girl on the Train

"When we were having sex, we were drunk—boy and girl drunk," he tells E! News of filming with Haley Bennett. "I thought we should have a little drink just to take the edge off. We were tipsy. We were show-tunes-singing-drunk while having fake sex. We sang Lion King."

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