• Home
  • Our team
  • Press
  • Contact
  • Intimacy on Set Guidelines
  • Training
  • Self-Care
Intimacy on Set

Vulture: How Normal People Does Sex So Good

30/4/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
By Rachel Handler

O’Brien kicked off the process of structuring the show’s intimate scenes quite early on. As the actors remember it, they’d only known each other for three or four days when O’Brien asked them to participate in an ice-breaking movement workshop. Mescal, 24, and Edgar-Jones, 21, remember the workshops as slightly mortifying. “We had to do a physical warm-up where we would inhabit animals, which is incredibly useful for the work, but my embarrassment threshold is quite low,” says Mescal. “I’m doing this in front of somebody who I was going to be working with for the next five months. I didn’t want Daisy to judge me or think that I was borderline insane.” Edgar-Jones laughs. “I was bent over because I was trying not to look at you.”

But both agree that the warm-ups were essential for creating a lighter mood and a deep sense of mutual trust that they kept up over the months of shooting. “Filming [sex scenes], you have to be able to have a giggle because it’s a strange situation to be in. You’re friends with all the crew. We’re all having lunch together. So you have to be able to laugh. And Ita just created an environment that was pressure-free,” Edgar-Jones says.

When considering what the sex scenes might look like, O’Brien took her initial cues from Rooney, who co-wrote the script with playwrights Alice Birch and Mark O’Rowe. “There was such a clear charting of the progression of their intimacy, and also the quality of the intimacy, both in the scenes with Marianne and Connell, and then the scenes with the other people they had sex with,” she says. Sometimes the script’s stage directions would be explicit, but sometimes they’d be more vague, something like, “They make love.” In those murkier cases, O’Brien would sit down and discuss the scenes with Abrahamson, Macdonald, Edgar-Jones, and Mescal to find the answer to an essential question: “What shape might this lovemaking take?”

Abrahamson in particular knew exactly how he wanted the scenes to look and feel. He showed O’Brien the photographs of Nan Goldin as a sort of mood board, explaining that he wanted the scenes to feel “unglamorous, just natural and normal, with open nakedness.” He meant that both literally and figuratively: As Mescal puts it, Abrahamson “didn’t want them to feel different from a dialogue scene.” And then, of course, he wanted actual nudity, too, to make their relationship feel authentic. “Lenny spoke about the palette of nakedness,” says O’Brien. “Things like, when you come out of the shower, to not feel that you’ve got to hide — just take the towel off and naturally get dressed. Postcoitally, he wanted them to just naturally be lying there.”

Later in the series, when Marianne and Connell are more comfortable together and established as a couple, Mescal appears postcoital and fully nude with a flaccid penis; he laughs remembering how Abrahamson was “so nervous” about bringing up the nudity during his chemistry read with Edgar-Jones. “He was like, ‘Now you know, Paul, as you’ve seen in the book, we’re requiring and asking you for a full-frontal nudity clause,’” Mescal recalls. “I was totally surprised by the fact that there would be any other way of doing it. If you’re going to do the book correctly, I think that’s required.”

Both actors were thrilled but a little bit frightened by the volume and raw nature of the scenes. “Initially, when I read the scenes, I was really excited by them because they weren’t sex scenes that I had seen onscreen,” says Mescal. “And the prospect of bringing something to the screen that I felt was representative of the reality of young people in love having sex was really exciting to me.” He was admittedly wary, though, of the idea that his naked body would be forever immortalized on the internet. “That is going to be out there forever,” he says. “But then to know that the process was going to be in place with Ita and Lenny and Hettie, I felt totally safe and bolstered.”


​More . . .
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    By publication

    All
    ABC
    Artshub
    Arts Review
    Ask
    Austin Chronicle
    Backstage
    BBC News
    BBC Radio 4
    BBC Radio 5 Live
    BBC Scotland
    BBC The One Show
    BBC World Service
    Belfast Telegraph
    BFI
    Biiinge
    Broadcast
    Broadly
    Brut India
    BT
    Bustle
    CBC
    CBS
    Collider
    Cosmopolitan
    Creative Review
    Daily Beast
    Daily Express
    Dazed
    Deadline
    Decider
    Die Welt
    Digital Spy
    Directors Notes
    Drama Quarterly
    Elle
    El Pais
    Empire
    Entertainment Weekly
    Esquire
    Evening Express
    Evening Standard
    Express Digest
    Female First
    Franceinfo
    Gay Star
    Gay Times
    Girlsroom
    Glamour
    GQ
    Grazia
    Harpers Bazaar
    Hollywood Reporter
    Hot Press
    Huffpost
    I
    I D
    I-D
    Independent.ie
    India Times Post
    Indiewire
    Inside Film
    Inside Hook
    Insider
    InStyle
    Interview Magazine
    Irish Examiner
    Irish Mirror
    Lad Bible
    LA Times
    Lifestyle Inq
    Link
    Little White Lies
    London Post
    Longreads
    Mail Online
    Mamamia
    Mashable
    Metro
    Movies Insider
    MSN
    Net-a-Porter
    Netflix
    Newflixqueue
    News18
    New Statesman
    New Yorker
    New York Times
    NME
    NPR
    Opentapes
    Opera Today
    Palatinate
    Popsugar
    Press Association
    Radio NZ
    Radio Times
    Rolling Stone
    Royal Television Society
    RTE
    SBS
    Scen & Film
    Screen Daily
    Shoot
    Sky News
    Spotlight
    Stylecaster
    Stylist
    Suddeutche Zeitung
    Syfy
    The Conversation
    The Cut
    The Daily Mail
    The Face
    The Female Career
    The Financial Times
    The Guardian
    The Hindu
    The Independent
    The Irish Times
    The Irish World
    The Jakarta Post
    The Mirror
    The New European
    The Observer
    The Playlist
    The Screenster Podcast
    The Tab
    The Telegraph
    The Times
    The Washington Post
    Toast
    Today FM
    TV Guide
    TV Insider
    Tyla
    Vancouver Courier
    Vanity Fair
    Variety
    Vice
    Vogue
    Vox
    Vulture
    WDR
    WhatsonStage
    Who What Where
    W Magazine
    Women And Hollywood
    World News Network
    W Radio
    Yahoo

    Archives

    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    August 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018

    RSS Feed

Picture
Intimacy on Set Ltd
Reg. in England & Wales No.11289710