Joanna Lumley isn’t at all keen on sex scenes in films – comparing them to watching someone use the toilet.
The veteran actress, 77, wants sex scenes axed completely, branding them “rude and horrible”. She explained on the Radio Times Podcast: “The second you take your clothes off, the audience looks at you, the actor, and your attributes – what your breasts and genitals are like.
“You’ve immediately lost the character you’ve built. There’s a playground element to it – pull your pants down and let’s see what you’ve got. I’d cut them altogether. They slow things down. They’re rude and horrible. I don’t watch people on the lavatory!”
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The Absolutely Fabulous star has stripped off for projects like 1973’s Don’t Just Lie There, Say Something!, but told the Guardian it felt like making “soft porn”. She said: “[Stripping off] was standard and it was this, ‘You’re not a real actress unless you take your top off’.
(Image: ITV/REX/Shutterstock)
“Nobody liked it, like nobody likes intimate kissing or sex scenes. All this ghastly stuff we have to pretend to do. I find them intolerable! I think they’re revolting, I don’t know why people write them and I don’t know why we watch them. We wouldn’t have films of people sitting on the loo. There are some things which are private.”
Dame Joanna says topless scenes felt “exploitative”, but she found herself “caught up” in doing them to advance her career. And there was a big difference between how men and women were treated for films like Games That Lovers Play, in which she starred as a brothel owner.
She told Esther Rantzen on her That’s After Life! podcast in 2021: “You’d never see the front of a man but you’d always see the front of a woman. All women were expected to go topless, Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Christie, we all had to take our tops off. It was part of the titillation of the time.
(Image: Negus/Fancey/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock)
“Yes, I was in a film called the Breaking Of Bumbo and I was in that with the gorgeous Richard Warwick. We were doing one of these love scenes where we walked towards each other both naked as the day were born, but guess what? You saw Richard’s back and bottom and you see all my front.
“That was par of the course. I hated nude scenes. I never longed to strip off and run into the sea. I’m quite a prude.”
Even though many modern sex scenes use intimacy coordinators to help the actors feel at ease, Joanna confessed: “Thank God I’m beyond it now.”
(Image: Dave Benett/Getty Images for Bur)
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Joanna’s not the only one – Superman star Henry Cavill isn’t a fan of sex scenes either. He confessed on the Happy Sad Confused podcast: “There are circumstances where a sex scene actually is beneficial to a movie, rather than just the audience… [but] I think sometimes they’re overused these days. It’s when you have a sense that you’re going, ‘Is this really necessary, or is it just people with less clothing on?’
“That’s when you start to get more uncomfortable and you’re thinking, ‘There’s not a performance here. There’s not a piece which is going to carry through to the rest of the movie.'”
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
