"A Scandal in Belgravia" involves Irene Adler, a high-class dominatrix whose career providing "recreational scolding" has left her in the possession of compromising photographs of a young royal. Sherlock is given the job of getting the photographs back but finds himself competing for this MacGuffin with mysterious American bad guys and the confusing effects of an unprecedented attraction to Irene herself, a woman who wields a riding crop like a master but is herself more turned on by cerebration. "Brainy's the new sexy," she whispers huskily to Sherlock, exemplifying the old sexy by entering the room stark naked.
"They give you a self-adhesive bra that sticks to you and ... imagine a sanitary towel made of tan Lycra, but with wire through it so it cups the underneath of you. And Louboutin shoes," said Pulver. "Paul McGuigan [the director] very sweetly said to me, 'OK, the choice is we spend hours shooting it to avoid seeing straps or we take all that off and shoot it quickly.' I thought I couldn't put myself through being there all day, practically naked anyway, so I might as well get completely naked and get it done in a few hours."
She admitted: "I have never felt so vulnerable in my whole life and in feeling that vulnerability it unleashed an inner power. I thought, 'OK, I'm naked, I'm exposing everything, you can't hide behind Spanx, you can't hide behind a dress.' It's like, 'I'm completely naked, what of it?' There is something about being a woman and being naked that's great and I thought, 'Let's just celebrate that'".
Asked by her co-star Una Stubbs, who plays Sherlock's landlady Mrs Hudson: "So you took it all off?" Pulver replied: "Yes ... There's nothing to hide behind, no mask, and something really empowering takes over." Pulver added: "Martin was naked in Love Actually. Benedict is always naked – he was naked on stage in Frankenstein – so I was just joining the club. It was like, 'Let's all just get nude and do Hair The Musical!' Martin said a few things but they were harmless. They were both supportive and by the end of it I wouldn't move on to the next line until Benedict had stared at my boobs!"
In contrast, she jokes that co-star Freeman was nothing but trouble during the scene when she confronted the pair naked. She says the Office actor was even nicknamed Martin Freehands for his over-attentiveness to her as they filmed. "Martin is always naughty. 'Martin Freehands' is so true. He was like, 'Oh, there she is. She's naked and there's her arse crack and off we go... '"
The actress said she bore similarities to her TV alter ego, who flirted with Holmes while wearing only diamond earrings, lipstick and heels, and went on to strike him across the face with a riding crop while perched suggestively on a chair- although Cumberbatch has only got himself to blame for moaning that she whacked him too hard! "Benedict said, 'It's all right, Lara, you can hit me harder," Pulver told TV Biz. "I was like, 'Oh can I now, Benedict Cumberbatch?' Imagine how many whips I am going to receive in the post now!" In truth, she suggests, there are 'huge elements of the characters that are us'. "But I don't go around whipping people. And I'm not a lesbian," she told the magazine.
Adler is, it turns out, a follower of the blog and something of a fan, so she and Sherlock are able to flirt over unsolved enigmas. Her nudity is a mind-game, not a desperate bid for attention. The teasing eroticism of Sherlock and Irene's affair is solely one of the mind, yet the BBC still received more than 100 complaints about the pre-watershed scenes. Pulver, whose credits also include True Blood and Spooks, said the adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories was a hit because it did not "underestimate people's intelligence". She added of the detective: "I think he has so much going on in his genius brain that he doesn't even think of women as sexual beings. A beautiful woman could walk past him naked – as I did – and it doesn't register."
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