The Mad Men Of Sex

Masters of Sex (premiering in 2013) is an amazingly attention-getting title for a new TV show, right? According to one of the stars, the Showtime series lives up to it. Speaking to HuffPost TV, Emmy and Golden Globe winner Beau Bridges, who plays mentor to Michael Sheen's William Masters and Lizzy Caplan's Virginia Johnson, the two real-life pioneers of human sexuality studies in the 1950s, described the following hilariously graphic scene:

"It's about Masters and Johnson, the man and woman who instigated all these incredible sexual experiments back in the '50s," Bridges said. "I am the dean of the university where these experiments are happening. I'm sort of mentoring Masters - he's my hope for the future - so I'm a little freaked when he tells me what he's going to do."

So what are they going to do exactly?

"The first thing I have to do is peer at a woman's vagina through a dildo while she masturbates ... and it's outfitted with a magnifying glass. The poor woman who had to have her legs up in stirrups, I couldn't see her face because they had up a cloth ... and then my wife and I are out to dinner in New York, where we filmed, and this lady comes up and was very nice and friendly, 'Oh it's so nice to see you!' and it was this woman that I'd been staring at her crotch all day! [Laughs.] I said, 'I hardly recognize you!'"


John Madden, the British director behind Shakespeare in Love and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, shot that scene and the rest of the pilot episode in and around New York City. "You couldn't do this on regular TV," he says. "It is somewhere between House and Mad Men. It has the period feel, but mainly the pair have such an extraordinary journey and it's their exciting relationship that is the heart of the story." He says of his cast: "Michael is amazing and Lizzy is in a very different role than what she has played before. Caitlin Fitzgerald is Masters' wife. And Beau Bridges plays the chancellor of the university where they started doing their work." So what Mad Men is to advertising, Masters of Sex is to, well, sex? "It absolutely is," Madden assures.

If that description makes it sounds a bit like Kinsey, then Michael Sheen is keen to point out "he was sort of around a few years previous to Masters and Johnson, and his work was really based on questionnaires, so the big difference was that the work the Masters did was with actual people, you know," he says. "It wasn't just asking questions and compiling information. This was about actually looking at the effects on the body of sex, which obviously involves having bodies to research on, and since it's on Showtime, you get total freedom really in terms of exploring it. It should be fascinating." Does that freedom extend to to some candid nudity from Sheen himself? Co-star Lizzy Caplan has recently been agitating for exactly that in the name of equal representation. "Well, I think some things are best enjoyed in small doses!" laughs Sheen.