Hits And Misses In The Nudity Debate

Hit & Miss bares some interesting questions about nudity on television, argues The Guardian's Mark Lawson. Nudity on screen can often seem unnecessary or gratuitous – but Sky Atlantic's new drama suggests this isn't always the case. A drama producer who has worked in both television and radio once said that the great benefit of working on the wireless was that there was never any hassle from actors or audiences over nude scenes. Apart from strong language, nakedness is the most frequent complaint in TV feedback forums and, in both cases, the objection is that these elements are unnecessary or gratuitous. The difference is that whereas opinions on language are largely generational – the more recent the viewer's birth-date, the less likely they are to be offended by swearing – objections to nudity are more widely shared because of changing attitudes to women on screen, often influenced by feminism.

In this context, one of the striking aspects of new Sky Atlantic drama Hit & Miss, Paul Abbott and Sean Conway's compelling drama about a transgender assassin played by Chloe Sevigny, is that it contains a moment that attempts to make the case for a full-frontal nude scene that is dramatically crucial and completely non-gratuitous.


Sevigny's character Mia, who is undergoing hormone treatment prior to the final transformative operation, stands naked in front of a mirror. The unusual complexity of this image is that the viewer is seeing male and female nakedness simultaneously, being shown genuine breasts and a prosthetic penis.

It might possibly be objected that this scene is prurient – offering up a transgender patient as a sort of freak-show – but Mia is explicitly a character tracking the transformations of her body and it is relevant to the narrative for the audience to know what she has under her clothes at this stage: the information pays off in later scenes when her long-lost son surprises her in the bath and a local lothario tries to grope her between the legs. Abbott and Conway are surely right – and Sevigny seems to have agreed – that the reveal was necessary.

Most dramas, though, can't claim such an easy absolution. In British cop shows of the 1970s and '80s, it sometimes seemed almost obligatory for the central detective to be interrupted during love-making by a call-out to a crime-scene. As he heaved discreetly out of bed – often conveniently wearing boxers or even trousers – his big-busted girfriend would walk, in the foreground of the shot, naked past him to the bathroom. Lawson's memory suggests that The Sweeney was a particular offender.

Greater sensitivity to the exploitation of women has reduced the popularity of such shots, although one contributor to the Guardian's letters page reported that he had stopped watching Homeland after episode four because of the frequent female nudity. The correspondent found these shots of women's bodies "misogynistic" and accused reviewers who admired the series of either ignoring or privately revelling in this woman-hating parade of flesh.

Lawson's view was that the other qualities of the series (acting, shooting, writing, plotting) were enough to overlook the inequalities of its costume policy. And the far greater quantity of female than male full-frontal scenes in screen drama results from something more complicated than just male chauvinism in the production process.

The standard compositions of TV sex scenes – the woman, with her breasts showing, on top of the man; or the man on top of the woman, whose breasts are showing – follow from the widely acknowledged theory that sexual arousal in men has a more dramatic visual indication than for women, and the regulatory and legal convention that erect penises are seen only in pornography or, more recently, 18 certificate movies. So, on television, if an actor is shown walking fully-naked towards a bed before a passionate love scene, application of the editorial guidelines raises distracting issues about his enthusiasm for the relationship.

But, while this excuse is true, it does also encourage lazy direction. The fact that an actor can't be shown fully naked during sex but that an actress can doesn't mean that the latter has to be. It is possible to film bedroom scenes while protecting the modesty of both participants – and certainly Homeland would not have suffered from a lower nipple count. Hit & Miss, however, fascinatingly fleshes out the debate over how naked bodies should be shown.
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Showing Faith In Grace

Last month, Showtime revealed that it was casting a 'major female role' for the sixth season of Californication with an eye towards creating a spinoff for the series. Writer-executive producer Tom Kapinos is said to have created a new professional groupie character, named Faith, who will feature prominently and possibly form the basis for a subsequent stand-alone show. She’s a beautiful American in her mid-to-late 20s, and described as "what happens when an innocent young Catholic school girl is exposed to the evils of rock and roll and falls heads over heels in love with the music and the men who make it." Faith has been on the road with various bands for years and is considered a muse by some elite artists. Though she has a fondness for sex, drugs and rock and role, she remains quite religious. Think a modern-day Penny Lane in Almost Famous on a spiritual quest to reconcile her extreme behavior with her conservative background.

Injecting new characters into an existing show is one of the preferred methods lately to attempt a spinoff, such as NCIS and Bones introducing characters for NCIS: LA and The Finder, respectively. Entertainment Weekly suggests the Californication plan is more unique since Faith is expected to play a significant role next season rather than just appearing in a one-off 'backdoor pilot'. At this early stage, the spinoff is by no means assured. First the producers will have to cast the right actress, then the role must connect with viewers.


The first part of that equation has now been addressed, with Maggie Grace signing on for an extended run. Grace is perhaps best known for her role as Shannon Rutherford on the first two seasons of Lost, in addition to her appearances in Taken, Knight and Day, Lockout, The Fog, Suburban Girl and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 & Part 2. Grace will also appear in the upcoming Fox series, The Following opposite Kevin Bacon. As Faith, she will befriend David Duchovny's Hank Moody early in the sixth season and if you've ever watched the show then you know that it is a very safe assumption that they will wind up as lovers at some point. Grace's stint on Californication is slated to run for nine episodes and the fate of the potential spinoff hinges upon how eagerly the audience embraces her.

You would imagine that the male half of the show's audience will be sold immediately upon the character's planned introductory scene; namely, a "dream sequence in which Faith is being 'eaten out' by Jesus. Slowly- naked save for a little cross of gold around her neck- she rejoins the land of the living, an 'angel beneath the sheets'. The detailed character description then describes Faith, still naked, as having a pretty long conversation with a nameless rock star, before she "gets him to cum, he writes a song and then she gets out of bed. Naked and beautiful. Walking inspiration." The musician watches her, hypnotized by Faith's 'intoxicating combination of sunshine and sin'. Unsurprisingly, given the character and the show, the role requires both tasteful nudity and simulated sex.

It should be noted again, in the interest of balance, that introducing a recurring character on a show with the intention to possibly spin them off into a new series is not as definitive as a traditional planted spinoff. For instance, the producers of Fox’s House explored the idea of a spinoff starring Michael Weston’s recurring PI character on the medical drama but ultimately opted against it.

Californication season six will debut in early 2013 on Showtime.
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A (Partial) Defense Of Nudity

When Myles McNutt popularized the term sexposition last year to describe scenes in Game of Thrones where one character explains a concept while other characters have sex unrelated to that conversation in the same frame, he came up with something really funny and useful. But, thinks Alyssa Rosenberg, people have now ended up suggesting that all the sex and nudity in Game of Thrones is prurient rather than relevant and feels really strongly that isn’t true. In truth, she believes, they’re being somewhat more thoughtful in season 2.


There are scenes in season 1 that are just ludicrous, admits Rosenberg — Littlefinger’s yammering around his prostitutes, the Dothraki wedding sequences. That said, she feels nudity is a driver of personality more the show got credit for in Season 1. There was something really likable, for example, about the good cheer of the prostitutes bursting in on Tyrion in our introduction to the character. It’s okay to use female nudity solely to advance our impression of a male character, but given the show’s very impressive investment in Peter Dinklage as a sex symbol, Rosenberg thinks that scene was kind of remarkable. She also liked the scene of Ros flashing Theon as she leaves for King’s Landing, a moment that showed her comfort with her body as a commodity while also reinforcing Theon as kind of a randy idiot. And Dany’s nudity at the end of the finale felt powerful for the same reason Margaery’s does: her femininity is as exposed as it can get, which should make her vulnerable, and instead it’s a moment of triumph and dignity for her.

This season, there have been a couple stand-alone examples that have felt particularly important. When Theon has sex with the daughter of the ship captain who’s bringing him back to his childhood home on Pyke, the show spends a lot of time lingering on her face and body, neither of which are particularly conventionally attractive. But Theon ends up complicit in our judgement of her. He tells her to shut her mouth so he won’t have to look at her teeth. He ignores her requests to go with him when he leaves the ship, and ignores her when she says her father will punish her for sleeping with him. He’s using her, and assumes that because she’s an ugly girl, she ought to be sexually available to him and grateful for the attention. The whole scene, including her nakedness, is about explaining Theon’s sexual entitlement, his voraciousness, the inflated sense of self that will later lead to his spectacular humiliation.

You can feel the same way about Margaery Tyrell’s scene with her husband, Renly Baratheon, argues Rosenberg. The scene starts with him acknowledging how beautiful she is. But he’s profoundly uncomfortable with her naked body, repulsed by the sexual attraction he knows he’s supposed to be feeling. The contrast between her beautiful body and his reaction, which I thought was a really beautiful piece of acting, is part of what makes the scene. The other part of what makes the scene great is her utter comfort in her body, in her nakedness. Margaery may be a woman, and she may be in a situation where most of us might feel sexually vulnerable. But she’s better equipped than her husband to talk about the fact that they need to get pregnant, and quickly, and she’s more at home in her body, what her body craves, and what other people want her body to be used for than Renly is. Even Melisandre’s sort of cheesy seduction of Stannis Baratheon bears literal fruit in the terms of a quick-gestating smoke monster.

Equally, she insists, the scene where Joffrey orders Ros to first beat Daisy and then rape her with a scepter was the perfect example of why people shouldn’t dismiss nude scenes and sex scenes as they come up in the show and forget that they might pay off later. We meet Daisy when Ros is giving her a tour of Littlefinger’s brothel, including scenes where she’s instructing other prostitutes on how to fake pleasure with clients more convincingly. We see Daisy naked in an interrupted tryst with Pycelle, huddling naked on the floor as her client gets his beard cut off and sent to prison, and we see Tyrion pay her off, adding a tip and a smile. These scenes, as well as non-sexual ones like Daisy crying over a colleague’s murdered child, give us a relationship with these small characters (neither of whom exist in the books, by the way). And then we see these women turned against each other, one forced to torture the other at pain of death. Without those previous scenes, Joffrey would be torturing anonymous whores. With them, he’s torturing people. That arc gives Game of Thrones a lot of credit. You would be hard-pressed to dismiss a silly sex scene now, because how do we know it’s not going to pay off painfully later down the road?

Besides, we actually don’t see a lot of the female characters nude. Two of them are children. Catelyn is a widow deep in mourning. On a factual note, Lena Headey may be naked less as Cersei because she has significant tattoos and covering them up would be a lot of work, so it may just be a tech thing. Brienne is a knight. Interestingly, we haven’t seen Shae naked at all this season, though she is Tyrion’s lover and a sex worker. I guess, concludes Rosenberg, I don’t mind seeing women naked at the same time that the show is giving them personality and humanity they don’t have in the novels. The show may make Ros and Daisy naked, but Ros is literally a line in the novels and Daisy doesn’t exist at all. Now, they’re people to us, and hurting them makes us feel pain.
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Skin Wearing Thin

Game of Thrones, HBO’s hit drama based on George R.R. Martin’s much-loved “Song of Ice and Fire” fantasy series, can be counted on for a few things: severed heads, insider intrigue, mythical creatures, and a huge and confusing cast of characters. Oh, and naked women. Lots of them. Writing in the Washington Post, columnist Anna Holmes questions whether the constant exposure of skin is starting to wear a little thin.

Frequent and often outlandish, the show’s eroticism often overshadows or distracts from the actual story, thinks Holmes. It’s not just me, she says: After the copious amounts of tits & ass during the show’s first season reached a nadir of absurdity with a now-notorious scene involving two prostitutes pleasuring each other, Onion AV Club television critic Myles McNutt was moved to coin the term “sexposition” to describe the way the show’s producers often arbitrarily shoehorn sex into the narrative as a way to cover up potentially snooze-inducing exposition.


The second season isn’t much better. April 8’s episode, “The Night Lands,” depicted a three-way peep show of sorts that seemed to serve no purpose except to show as many kinds of heterosexual sex in as short a time span as possible, states Holmes. And on April 14, just two weeks after the new season began, NBC’s Saturday Night Live ran a faux promo joking that “Throne’s” success is partly attributable to the involvement of a creative consultant named Adam Friedberg, a fictional 13-year-old boy.



HBO is by no means the only cable channel to traffic in gratuitous nudity, she notes, but it may be the most notorious, what with a backlist that includes Rome, Deadwood and The Sopranos. But unlike those shows, Game of Thrones is based on a much-loved and closely analyzed series of books, which means that fans can — and do — compare the scenes Martin imagined with the ones that show-runners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff often arbitrarily insert.

These scenes seem not only forced but exploitative. As Huffington Post television critic Mo Ryan put it in a review: “Sometimes ‘Game of Thrones’ uses sexual scenes to shed light on character. But quite often, it shows naked women because it can.” It is telling that few, if any, of the series’ most fully realized and complex female characters — and there are many — are ever shown naked, with the exception of Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen and the just-introduced Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer). And it’s probably no coincidence that as the character of Ros — a titian-haired prostitute played by Esme Bianco — becomes more nuanced the less the series requires her to disrobe.

Television critic Alyssa Rosenberg, a writer for the political and pop culture Web site Think Progress, disputes the proposition that sex and nudity that don’t appear in the book serve no purpose in the series. “I feel nudity is a driver of personality more than the show gets credit for” in Season 1, Rosenberg says. “And I guess I don’t mind seeing women naked at the same time that the show is giving them personality and humanity they don’t have in the novels.”

One could also argue that the series’ creators are only trying to communicate Westerosi society’s disregard for the lives of women or trying to establish a connection between the way they are objectified and the accompanying, constant threat of assault, but the show’s softly lit and erotic staging of any scene involving a naked woman evokes Playboy of the 1960s and ’70s more than it underscores sexual politics or a culture of violence. “While readers wade through sex, violence, and even sexual assault as part of the ruthlessness of Martin’s fictional world, television audiences can seemingly only handle two out of three,” wrote the Daily Beast’s Jace Lacob last June.

As for the men, well, they aren’t asked to bare all very often, if ever observes Holmes. By my count, she states, it has happened only once, to actor Alfie Allen (brother of pop singer Lily) who plays the turncoatish and arrogant Iron Islander Theon Greyjoy. But Allen’s nude body is not presented as pleasurable eye candy; viewers are not persuaded to desire him but to despise him. And the man straight female fans are arguably most likely to want to see disrobe, Kit Harrington’s Jon Snow, is likely to remain bundled up in the animal skins and iron armor favored by his military brotherhood, the Night’s Watch. Said one Twitter user, @Aurelia_Nicole, “I understand sex as a currency in Westeros but I need it to be a bit more egalitarian.”

Like the writers of “SNL,” Homes insists she is trying to have a sense of humor about Game of Thrones — or, at the very least, look on the bright side of all the breast-baring. It’s a great source of unintentional humour, for starters. She insists she can often tell by the sort of dress a female character is wearing whether she is likely to disrobe. (If it has buttons, they will come undone.) She also marvels at the semi-medieval society’s standards for personal grooming, which seem to anticipate the Brazilian waxes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: calling the pubic hair pattern so often seen on Westerosi women “the King’s Landing Strip.”

Yet there is something wearying and numbing about the series’ relentless oogling of the female form, concludes Holmes. It’s a constant reminder and reinforcement of the fact that pop-culture creators make content mainly for heterosexual men and then, maybe, for everyone else. They get tiring, these continued nods to the male gaze. (The implication is either that women aren’t watching or that the women who are watching have no interest in erotic eye candy of their own.) They’re also alienating, particularly when the sex seems to serve no purpose other than to titillate. Ultimately, her cluck-clucks of disapproval are as much about the situating of women as sex objects as they are my own sudden and reluctant prudishness.
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The Sexplanation Show

Corrina Lawson is relatively new to Game of Thrones fandom. She got hooked on the story about halfway through HBO’s televised adaptation of the first of George R.R. Martin’s books and when the show ended she kept reading. Having caught up with A Dance of Dragons, she then started indulging in the same pastime as everyone else who’d read the books — namely examining the show for differences. So far, she notes, the biggest difference is that the HBO show seems determined to introduce sex as a method to explain the hefty backstory in the books. Writing in Wired, Lawson states she finds this frustrating, a little bit offensive but mostly detrimental to the story.


In season one, she notes, there was Petyr Baelish’s monologue about who he really is set to the tune of two female prostitutes learning how to pretend to please each other for a male audience. Grand Maester Pycelle had a lovely morning with yet another prostitute, then we had a scene with Theon Greyjoy and his hired companion to explain why Theon is, well, Theon. (The same prostitute was in both Theon’s scene and Balish’s scene. I can just see the wardrobe order for the actress: ‘supply this one with easily shed tunics.’) Now, Shae’s night with Tyrion is in the books and Cersei’s liaison with Lancel is in the books too. Those were absolutely necessary scenes, especially given how those liaisons turn out.

But in only four episodes the second season, we’ve had Joffrey beat up two prostitutes hired by his uncle, Margaery Tyrell’s nudity to add something to Renly’s story, namely that he’s really, really gay, as if we didn’t know that from his (mostly clothed) scene with his lover, Loras; Baelish again, explaining to one of his prostitutes how he’s going to sell her to a seriously abusive person if she doesn’t stop being upset about watching a baby be destroyed; and Theon again, with the daughter of the captain of a ship and trying to fondle his sister. Theon’s escapades are in the book, too, and the scene with Yara is character driven, so you can give that a pass too. We also won’t count Melisandre’s “your vagina is haunted” moment either because that was one of the most harrowing scenes in the books, concedes Lawson, before countering you can count her and Stannis on top of the battle plans in an earlier episode, however. Seeing Stannis have sex was not on anyone's list of most wanted scenes in an adaptation.

Lawson insists she has no objection to nudity on cable channels. Spartacus on Starz is one of her favorite shows and you really can’t fit more nudity or sexual escapades than are in that show. But there’s a balance to Spartacus, in that the men are often as the women to be involved in either sex or violence and the nudity is equal opportunity for the most part. It feels part of the fabric of the story.

I also don’t find A Song of Fire and Ice as a whole anti-female or anti-feminist as some other critics of Martin’s series have. He’s chosen to write in a medieval-style world where women are valued as they were in our medieval age: for the children they produce and the alliances they can make. HBO has even made Catelyn Stark somewhat stronger on screen than in the books, especially in this new season. I credit that to the actress, Michelle Fairley. Similarly, Cersei comes off as more sympathetic on the show than in the books. There’s also Daenrys and Arya, characters who are as strong in the show as in the books.

Yet this constant need on the part of HBO to insert naked women to let us know that, say, Joffrey is a sadistic creep or that Baelish is someone not to be trusted is completely unnecessary and throws you out of the story, argues Lawson. It was very clear that Joffrey is a nasty piece by the scene where he wants to have Sansa beaten naked in front of his court and Baelish’s betrayal of the honorable Ned Stark last season is plenty of reason to remember that he’s not a good guy nor one to be trusted in any form.

There’s so much story in these books and some of it, such as the full story of Davos Seaworth, get only a quick mention instead of the greater focus that it deserves. We could see more of Joffrey’s Kingsguard and what they’re like and more of the City Watch as well. I know what they’re like from the books but if I were watching the show without reading, the banishment of Commander of the City Watch wouldn’t have meant nearly as much.

For this reason she hopes the trend doesn’t continue because it’s frustrating to watch the show resort to nudity as a device to catch viewers when the books are so rich. With Joffrey’s scene last week, this is now firmly a trend. Enough. There are plenty of actual reasons for nudity to happen for the story, we don’t need to add more because someone high up on the show or at HBO thinks the story needs more breasts to be good.

Because what’s happening is exactly the opposite, she concludes: it’s making the story worse.
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It’s Different For Girls

When a TV critic reports on a new show, it’s okay to say the series is promising, even the next big thing, but ideally, one shouldn’t go native. One should probably also talk in the third person. In this case, however, Emily Nussbaum is having to make an exception. Because from the moment she saw the pilot of Girls (which airs in the US on April 15), she was a goner, a convert. In an office at HBO, she writes in the New York Magazine, her heart sped up. She laughed out loud; she “got” the characters— four friends, adrift in a modern New York of unpaid internships and bad sex on dirty sofas. It is a sex comedy from the female POV, taking on subjects like STDs and abortion with a radical savoir-faire as well as a visual grubbiness that is a statement in itself.

It embraces digital culture, and daily confession, as a default setting. Even before the Republican candidates adopted The Handmaid’s Tale as a platform, Lena Dunham’s sly, brazen, graphic comedy, with its stress on female friendships, its pleasure in the sick punch line, its compassion for the necessity of making mistakes, feels like a retort to a culture that pathologizes feminine adventure. All of which is a lot of significance to lay on a half-hour HBO comedy.

Besides, you can see that there is another thing to notice about Girls: Lena Dunham’s body, which she has placed, quite deliberately, in the spotlight. Unlike many women on TV, Dunham is short and pear-shaped. She has a tattoo of Eloise on her back, plus ink done by her friend and co-star Jemima Kirke, whom she knew in high school at St. Ann’s. The filmmaker can look beautiful in the manner of twenties movie star Clara Bow: She has a small chin, a bow mouth, and very large brown eyes flecked with gold. But just as often, notes Nussbaum, she lets herself look like hell. Dunham films herself nude, with her skin breaking out, her belly in folds, chin doubled, or flat on her back with her feet in a gynecologist’s stirrups. These scenes shouldn’t shock, but they do, if only because in a culture soaked in Photoshop and Botox, few powerful women open themselves up so aggressively to the judgment of voyeurs.


There is no shortage of nudity on cable television, of course, where strip-downs are your prize for watching an “adult” series— porn with purchase, like a trip to the Champagne Room. But the sex on Girls isn’t a reward, it’s a revelation. This begins in the pilot, when the show introduces four characters: Dunham’s Hannah, whose professor parents have cut her off from the financial teat; her responsible friend Marnie (Allison Williams, Brian Williams’s daughter); and her irresponsible buddy Jessa (Kirke, the daughter of Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke); plus Jessa’s innocent, Sex and the City–addled cousin Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet, David’s daughter). Soon enough, there’s a graphic hookup between Hannah and her monkeyish sex buddy, Adam (the amazing Adam Driver), an artsy Prospect Heights carpenter who ignores her texts until she’s standing outside his window. But it’s the second episode that really goes raw, and when a moment of verbal role play flies right off the rails, leaving Hannah to wriggle her way through an epically bad lay, a scene that is filmed close-up, with covers off, and lacking any of the coy cutaway that usually transforms TV sex into a kind of sleek digital candy. The sequence makes you laugh out loud, and cringe, and cover your eyes, but it is also remarkably poignant. It is a scene that presents sex as a rough draft, a failed negotiation, at once hilarious and real.

All of Girls is a little like that. It’s a show about life lived as a rough draft—something well intentioned, possibly promising, but definitely begging for cruel critiques. And yet, at least so far, the show has attracted glowing notices, with The Hollywood Reporter calling it a “brilliant gem.” By giving Dunham many months to edit her ten episodes, HBO’s timing has proved strategic: When production began, there were few female-led sitcoms, but by spring, network television was hosting a half-dozen new hits, several with “girl” in the title. Bawdy and flawed, these series helped Girls in several ways. They gave the show something to be better than, they acclimatized the audience to vagina jokes—and just as usefully, they made it possible for Girls to debut without the pressure of representing Everygirl.

Still, it’s not difficult to imagine criticisms of Girls, many of them the type that greet “girl culture” in general, from chick-lit novels to Tori Amos albums—that it’s navel-gazing, that it’s juvenile, that it’s TMI. In addition, there’s what Dunham calls “the rarefied white hipster thing.” Despite the denials at HBO and by the show’s creators (it was practically a mantra on set that Girls is not the new Sex and the City), Girls is a post–Sex and the City show, albeit one with an aesthetic that’s raw and bruised, not aspirational. Sex and the City first achieved notoriety when its characters debated the power dynamics of anal sex during a cab ride, during the “up-the-butt girl” episode. In Girls, that discussion is not abstract: It’s Hannah, naked, on her knees, chattering anxiously as Adam pulls on (she hopes) a condom, trying to get some reassurance that he’s not heading in the wrong direction. Still, like SATC, Dunham’s show takes as its subject women who are quite demographically specific—cosseted white New Yorkers from educated backgrounds—then mines their lives for the universal. While the two shows dramatize very different stages of life, Girls might as well swing an arm around its Manolo’d aunt, who (even before she wrecked her brand with that awful trip to Abu Dhabi) took her own share of abuse.

Dunham’s been listening to Lady Gaga, thinking about the idea of attention—what it means to want it, what it feels like to get it, and how fame has changed for her generation. When asked why she’s naked so much in Girls, she just laughs. “I have no idea. I’m really trying to understand. Because at a certain point, it wasn’t like, I’m doing it out of necessity. I’m naked all the time.” Her friend Jenny Slate told her she only wants people she has sex with to see her naked; Lena jokes that she wants everyone except people she has sex with to see her naked. She ticks off a few reasons: “To feel some kind of ownership of your own body, the way getting tattoos does.” Another part feels like, “Not ‘Fuck you,’ but a way of saying, with these bodies, you know: Don’t silence them. I say I’m not a political person, but it’s a political statement in a way. I know it’s going to gross some people out. There’s people who don’t want to see bodies like mine or bodies like their own bodies.”

She shrugs. “It’s a very specific body,” she adds. “Even great reviews will be like: chubby, portly, overweight … Sometimes I’m like, Ugh, how did I make myself the guinea pig for this? But on the other hand, hating my body has not been my cross to bear in this life. Which I feel very lucky about.”
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A Class Act

Her luminous good looks made her the star of Little Dorrit and Upstairs Downstairs. As she prepares to light up our TV screens once again in BBC2's White Heat next month, Claire Foy tells The Independent about filming embarrassing sex scenes...

Born in 1984 in Stockport, Greater Manchester, in Stepping Hill hospital, scene of the recent spate of suspicious saline-drip deaths, Foy is the youngest of three siblings and part of a large, extended Irish (on her mother's side) family. She moved south to Buckinghamshire with her father's job (he was a salesman for Rank Xerox) and an averagely happy sort of childhood was only slightly discomfited, at the age of eight, by her parents' divorce. Claire was the least academic of the three children, but her mother's persistence with the schools' appeal system finally got her into the same grammar school as her older siblings, and she mustered enough A-level grades to secure a place at Liverpool John Moores University to do a joint-honours degree in drama and 'screen studies', with a vague idea of becoming a cinematographer – "not realising that you have to have an interest in lighting people," she laughs. "You should see the video of this children's TV programme we made at university. It was shockingly lit."


Foy was the only graduate from her course to actually go on and study acting – a year's course at the Oxford School of Drama. "I wouldn't have been able to go to drama school when I was 19," she says. "I don't think I was even conscious of life... I was like a zombie. But when I finished uni' I just realised... just go and do it, stop being a knob." What she could not have foreseen was the speed with which she would "go and do it". An obligatory episode of the BBC1 daytime soap Doctors and the pilot of BBC3's supernatural drama Being Human under her belt, Foy was plucked, as they say, from obscurity to play the title role in BBC1's 16-part adaptation of Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit. "It was a bit of a shock... yeah, it was very weird," she recalls. "I remember the first audition where I was sat with a load of ginger girls, and everyone was ginger apart from me. Rachel Frett, the casting director, was really plugging for me – I don't know why. I must have looked right because I was not doing it right. Then the BBC do like launching people, they do like finding people who haven't done anything before, and Andrew Davies likes doing that because then people think you are that character."

Actually, Davies has said that he wanted every shot in Little Dorrit to be "a big close-up of Claire and those huge eyes and that wonderful straight gaze," and indeed the enduring image of the series was not Andy Serkis's bravura malevolence as Rigaud, or Tom Courtenay's shambling brilliance as Mr Dorrit, but Foy's delicate and very still, pellucid white face and big blue eyes staring out from beneath her bonnet – more Irish moss than English rose, and the very picture of innocence. Of Little Dorrit, and the camera's absorption in her visage, she says: "It actually set me up quite well because the director, Dearbhla [Walsh], said to me, 'Your face is powerful enough to communicate stuff, so just trust that you don't have to...' you know. And less really is more."

So does that face get recognised in shops? "It depends whether I've been on the telly the night before. The Promise was the thing that got most people stopping." Peter Kosminsky's drama, in which Foy played a stroppy 18-year-old, Erin, experiencing a political and historical consciousness-raising gap-year in Israel, showed that she could do more than look beatific beneath a bonnet. The Night Watch, an adaptation of Sarah Waters's Sapphic love story unfolding against the backdrop of the Blitz, saw her playing Anna Maxwell Martin's girlfriend, while she appeared opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in a low-budget movie, Wreckers ("He's a complete geek... he's got more brain power than I will ever have so it just makes it so difficult to have a conversation with him"). And in a complete change of style and pace, she was the tabloid editor whose resemblance to Rebekah Brooks was entirely coincidental, in Channel 4's spoof of the phone-tapping scandal, Hacks. "I should play someone normal," she says.

Just not for the next few months as Foy will be prominent on our television screens in contrasting roles – as the fascist supporting Lady Persephone Towyn in Upstairs Downstairs, and then as Charlotte, a middle-class feminist in mid-Sixties London in the generational saga White Heat. It is the latter, and one aspect in particular, that is clearly on her mind. Paula Milne's new saga follows a group of student housemates from 1965 London to the present day (it's already been dubbed Our Friends in the South) and sees Foy returning to the more watchful ways of Amy Dorrit. Her Charlotte is a fledgling feminist, putting 'This Ad Degrades Women' stickers on London Underground posters, and falling into bed with her radicalised landlord (played by Sam Claflin). "If I never had to do [a sex scene] again that would be the best thing in the world because no one in their right mind would enjoy that," she says. "You're worried about what the crew are thinking, whether they're really uncomfortable, whether you're uncomfortable. You're just thinking, God, let this be over."

The Night Watch was the first time she had ever had to experience something like that; playfully sharing a bath Anna Wilson-Jones and a bed with Maxwell-Martin. "I remember thinking at the time, 'When it's on the telly I'm going to die' and actually I really didn't care. Because I'd done the worst bit of it... it's not like every time you see somebody, people are going to think they've seen you naked. You forget it, you just forget it."

This month she's taking her mother on holiday to New York, and is then doing the rounds with her newly acquired American agent. Martin Scorsese and Mark Rylance are mentioned as directors she'd like to act for. "I'd like to work with directors who really make you work hard,"she says. "I'd like to be given a responsibility and have to live up to it. I don't want to do anything easy because I've got the rest of my life to do that. Before I have kids and stuff I might as well get all the horrible, you know, self-involved stuff out of the way." An actor with a horror of self-involvement? Now there's a thing.
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Spartacus: Vengeance S03E03

Viva Bianca's Spartacus: Vengeance character Ilithyia has certainly changed since we first met her. She has grown from a mischievous schemer into an upper-class married woman, with a trail of devastation lying in her wake. We last saw Ilithyia two years ago in Spartacus: Blood and Sand as she sealed the doors, closing the pesky Lucretia (Lucy Lawless) behind them. Well, it seems that Ilithyia's best-laid plans didn't turn out quite as she wanted them to, and Lucretia is back on the scene -- more or less. Fortunately, for certain sections of the show's fanbase at least, some things such as Bianca's frequent nudity remains unchanged...

"Well, we do film some scenes with our clothes on," she laughs. "But, you know, when we do take off our clothes, it's never entirely comfortable." In fact, as revealed to The Huffington Post, Bianca insisted that no matter the number of times she disrobes on screen she can still find it a struggle. "You don't even really get used to doing scenes where you have to kiss, or be particularly intimate, with another person who's not actually your lover in real life," she admitted. "It's part of the job, and it's part of serving the story. When it comes to sex scenes and nudity, if the scene is relevant to the story and moves the story forward, then it's justifiable."


Warming to the subject, Bianca states these scenes have to be treated in the most clinical, strategic way possible. "There is absolutely nothing sexy about them when you're shooting," she explains. "There's a camera in your face, there are a hundred guys holding lights and booms. In between each take, you have your wardrobe people wrapping you in blankets. And let's not forget -- these guys you're acting with, they're like your brothers! You often end up laughing.

In many ways we haven't ever seen sex done quite this way before on TV. "It's a radical show and it's pushing the boundaries," agrees Bianca. "There's a lot of talk about the sensationalism of Spartacus, mainly the sex and the violence. But I think the success of the show is grounded on the integrity of the story and the complexity of character development and relationships." That's certainly true of Ilithyia, who seems to go from one thing to another to another. "It's epic, right?" she smiles. "She began as this brassy, mischievous, scheming princess character, but emerged from Season 1 as this villainess. Now, in Season 2, what's so lovely is I have the opportunity to play a more complex woman who's continually in a vulnerable state. Ilithyia has fallen from grace, and is desperately fighting for her livelihood and survival throughout Season 2."

Television Series: Spartacus: Vengeance (S03E03)
Release Date: February 2012
Actress: Katrina Law, Viva Bianca & Bonnie Sveen
Video Clip Credit: Zorg

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Spartacus: Vengeance S03E02

As befits her bubbly personality, Tasmanian-born actress Bonnie Sveen describes with an infectious laugh the memorable audition process she went through for Spartcaus: Vengeance, in which she made her nude debut this week. "Due to her colourful nature, playing a character like Chadara takes a lot of courage," stated the diminutive 5'4" former Home and Away star. "I had to deliver my lines to the reader imagining a giant Gladiator having sex with me. Goodbye self-consciousness!"

Chandara is a sex slave who's "very ruthless and in it for herself" so Sveen certainly knew what would be expected of her in the role. In theory, she insists, she had no problem with baring all on screen. "I'm a painter so I'm used to the naked anatomy. It's definitely a challenge, but it's an opportunity to discover a new braveness within yourself," she believes. In reality, Sveen stated there is still no way of preparing for the idea of getting nude on set. "If I could go back, I'd tell myself not to worry about it or even think about it," she said. "Once you're there you launch into it as you do in any other circumstance, performing." In fact, what surprised Sveen the most about working on Spartacus was the whole experience was different to anything she could've imagined. She gives the example of the atmosphere of those closed-set sex scenes. "The part of me observing the ridiculousness of what I was in just made me want to laugh!" she giggles. Thankfully, the costuming, hair, and make-up all help to make it easier to get into the spirit. "Everything you're given contributes to the mask of your character," explains Sveen. "Including the dirt and fake tan!"


Television Series: Spartacus: Vengeance (S03E02)
Release Date: February 2012
Actress: Viva Bianca, Katrina Law & Bonnie Sveen
Video Clip Credit: Zorg, Jabby & celebskin4free

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Borgen S01E07

Sex scandals, scheming politicians, a voluptuous PM and a pouting blonde... no wonder everyone's talking about Danish TV thriller Borgen, writes the Mail's Emily Hill. The first episode opens with a quote from Machiavelli’s The Prince – a clear signal of the scheming and skulduggery that lie ahead. There are scandals over expenses, teams of whispering spin doctors, a politician catapulted into the limelight by a successful televised debate and a country left in limbo as, behind closed doors, a coalition government is formed. Borgen comes from the same Danish team that created the phenomenally successful detective drama The Killing. As with that series, Borgen made its British debut on BBC4, has a huge following on the Corporation’s internet television service iPlayer, and will undoubtedly make a move to BBC2 before the end of the year.

Both shows share the same high production values and feature pithy scripts, strong female characters and chisel-jawed men. Relationships between the sexes are just as fascinating, with a different dynamic to that seen in many British crime dramas. For example, where Helen Mirren’s DCI Jane Tennyson in Prime Suspect is a lone woman battling prejudice in a man’s world, Borgen has more female characters at the top of the tree. Whether they work in TV or politics, they are not prepared to sacrifice glamour for the sake of ambition. Take the main character Birgitte Nyborg, played by Sidse Babett Knudsen, who is leader of the fictional Moderate Party and becomes the country’s first female prime minister. Driven and opportunistic, she is also human and self-deprecating. She enjoys wine and cheerfully admits to battling with her weight as she struggles to cram her voluptuous frame into a power suit. Though conscious of her appearance, she is certainly not neurotic about her body, and enjoys flaunting it – at least if her frequently fruity exchanges with her husband are anything to go by.


Prime Minister Nyborg’s nemesis is the stunningly beautiful and brutally ambitious television reporter Katrine Fønsmark, played by 30-year-old Birgitte Hjort Sørensen. Fønsmark goes from dating one aide to sleeping with the prime minister’s spin doctor, who promises to leave his wife and children for her. They celebrate by making love at a hotel – but the following morning she finds him dead in bed. Fønsmark, who fears she may be pregnant, has to carry on covering an election as though nothing has happened. They are different settings and of different times, of course, but Fønsmark’s predicament is not unlike Lady Mary Crawley’s in Downton Abbey. Sørensen says: "Over here, we are all addicted to Downton Abbey. My character, like Lady Mary, finds her lover dead in bed, which is rather shocking."

Described as the epitome of happiness by her English teacher at school, the description fits nicely as Sørensen's engaging laugh fills the room. The actress adds words like dutiful and earnest about herself, before describing how the role in Borgen has rubbed off on her, as she is watching the news more and with a keener critical eye. Even politicians have become more exciting to listen to, she thinks.

Sørensen is an Anglophile who played Roxy Hart in the hit musical Chicago in the West End in 2008. She said: "I am a big fan of British actresses, especially Kate Winslet. Like Helen Mirren she can be both incredibly strong but equally vulnerable." She is delighted that a Danish drama set in distant, dark Copenhagen, could prove such a success in Britain. "I don’t think anyone would have imagined a Danish series would become popular in any other country because no one else speaks the language," she said.


Television Series: Borgen (S01E07)
Release Date: January 2012
Actress: Birgitte Hjort Sørensen
Video Clip Credit: Trailblazer












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Spartacus: Vengeance S03E01

As the men of Spartacus waged war all around her, Katrina Law’s character – slave girl Mira – was largely mute. That’s going to change as the series begins its third, well second, season with Spartacus: Vengeance. This season picks up where we left off in Spartacus: Blood and Sand, following the bloody escape from the House of Batiatus, gladiators and slaves alike continuing the battle for freedom, events which have opened up all kinds of avenues for Mira. "She was a house slave without hopes, dreams or opportunities," says Law. "So along comes Spartacus, who presents her with an opportunity for, potentially, love and freedom. And this year, you’re going to see her on the run with the rest of the rebels."

That meant some pretty intense physical preparation for Law, an exotic beauty who grew up in South Jersey with a love of action. “Watching all the boys have fun and get to play, while I stood there until I got to pour them water or wine, I was jealous,” Law confides about season one. “So this year, to be able to run around and hit the ground and get bloody along with everyone else, it was a lot more fun.” Not to mention a lot of work. Law trained for two-and-half months with noted trainer and fitness model Anca Marcus before reporting for gladiator training – a two-week marathon that involved, among other things, rolling 300-pound tractor tires, something called the Circle of Death, heavy duty circuit work, weapons training and fight choreography. "I was in relatively good shape and I then get down there and we did two weeks of Gladiator Boot Camp and let me tell you, it took about six days before I could walk normally again after that," says Law.


The intense regime also gave Law the body confidence needed for the copious amount of nudity that is such an integral part of the show. Spartacus, as she explains, is not a show for the faint of heart. "It’s so sexually charged and violent— you have to know where to look," said Law. "We were shooting one scene where these eight fired-up gladiators all dropped their drawers. You had to look at the floor, the ceiling — or the eight penises." Beyond the penises, she’s had an honour few actors have: she’s shot a full-frontal bath scene with Lucy Lawless. When quizzed about it, she laughs for ten seconds straight. "Does that reaction tell you how I felt about the scene?" she chuckles. "That time, I was more scared of the camera. But Lucy made sure I was taken care of, and she was topless, too. [Any time I felt weird], I just remembered, ‘Hey, I’m looking at Xena’s boobs!’" Not one of the most discomforting thoughts.

Warming to the subject of doing naked scenes, Law shared that the people behind the show take the scenes very thoroughly. "They light you well, they pose you well, they do all this stuff with makeup and lighting and editing," she explained. "They really protect the actors on this show. If there is a bad angle, I know I really did something to piss someone off." Protected or not, the actress says she still finds it weird to watch playback. "I have this weird, oblong alien face! I have to get over myself to even look at my work." Fortunately, that isn’t a problem for us. And, thanks to her exotic beauty—something she attributes to her mixed Taiwanese, Italian and German heritage — we suspect it isn’t a problem for most men, either.

Surprisingly, that’s not the case. "Actually, men never approach me!" she protests, before recalling how she had to take the lead with her new co-star and onscreen lover in their intimate scenes. "I felt like the old pro, 'Just take your clothes off, hon, it's going to be fine,'" she told Liam McIntyre. "It's all in a day's work," laughed Law.


Television Series: Spartacus: Vengeance (S03E01)
Release Date: January 2012
Actress: Katrina Law, Viva Bianca, Lucy Lawless
Video Clip Credit: Jabby


















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Shameless US S02E04

"Fucking hell, this is amazing..."
"Flattery will get you everywhere!"

Lip Gallagher doesn't want to give up having sex with Karen (we can't blame him, we wouldn't be able to let go of Laura Wiggins either), so he's trying to make her leave her fiance. Step one of his master plan: have crazy ass-against-the-wall sex with Mandy (as portrayed by Emma Greenwell). Step two: ask Mandy to seduce Karen's fiance. We think that's a bad idea, but that's not our main concern. We're primarily focused on step 1.5 which involves Lip and Mandy placing their hands over each other's mouth to muffle their orgasms. It's anticlimactic in a very pro-climactic way!

Inevitably, Jody refuses Mandy's advances and then tells Karen. Karen goes to the Gallagher house and kicks the crap out of Lip. She reveals in a moment of rage the real reason she wants to marry Jody. She’s pregnant. "Stay the fuck away from me," she shouts, "and stay the fuck away from this baby!" Uh oh. Karen has only been sleeping with Lip, not Jody. Jody is older and can provide. Lip cannot. So that’s why she’s doing it and not because of Jody’s dong. Speaking of which, did you SEE that thing? collectively gulps the blogosphere.


Television Series: Shameless US (S02E04)
Release Date: January 2012
Actress: Emma Greenwell
Video Clips Credit: Deep at Sea, Zorg, Wimsey










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House Of Lies S01E04

"Dance for me, Roxy..."

Dawn Olivieri is a star whose rise to TV fame more or less exploded when she landed a recurring role on The CW’s hit series The Vampire Diaries. But it’s a lead spot on Showtime’s House Of Lies where she finally bares all- in more ways than one. She plays Monica Talbot, a woman the actress describes as "narcissistic, manipulative" and willing to do anything to get what she wants. In other words, Olivieri told TV Fanatic, it's her "dream character." Viewers got an immediate impression of Monica in the first few seconds of the pilot episode, as it opened with her lying naked in bed alongside her ex-husband and top business rival, Don Cheadle's Marty Kaan. Look for these two to often be in such compromising positions together. "You don't wanna be taking your clothes off for any old show," Olivieri laughed. "But House of Lies covets that quick wit, that truth, those in-your-face situations... if you're gonna be naked, it might as well be for a show like this."

Olivieri says that since she started acting "pretty much everybody wants me to be naked!" She was so happy getting The Vampire Diaries on The CW knowing that all they could do to me was put her in that bra and underwear, which of course they did! "It’s just my luck in life here," she smiles. "I work out too much, and therefore everybody that hires you wants you to take off your clothes! It's just the way it is. One day I’m going to be very old and I’m not going to have the body that I have."


There is still a little embarrassment though. "It pushes the limit for me, at times, of vulnerability," Olivieri admits. "I think, never are you as vulnerable as when you are completely naked having a scene with someone. I mean, you pretty much can’t get more naked than that, emotionally and physically. So there’s definitely moments in this series that I’ve really had to strong arm my disposition and say, listen, I got to figure out ways to do this and make it real and forget the fact that there are 17 people standing around me, two of which have huge cameras, and really just go for it. I’m naked sometimes, but whatever. I don’t care."

So the nudity is set to continue then? "Oh yeah, come on, it’s Showtime!," she answers cheerfully. "But I’m naked less than Don Cheadle is naked, so at least that makes me feel better." It also helps to share these scenes with such a veteran actor. Olivieri can't say enough positive things about her co-star, referring to him at various times as "accommodating, compassionate, open and a genius in subtlety and nuance." For someone who has only been acting for six years, Olivieri said the experience has been "terrifying" and, well, "orgasmic." "He's the lifeline she can use to manipulate Marty," Olivieri says. "She'll use any kind of business strategy to close a deal. I'll just say this," Olivieri teases. "She's a business woman at all times. If someone or something is encroaching on her territory, she's gonna do something about that."

She certainly doesn't seem to be the most well put-together girl then. "Yeah, she has this psychotic diagnosis," continues the actress. "But where is that coming from? It’s coming from Marty, it’s coming from her ex-husband. And what I liked, what I connected with in creating this character for me was the fact that if you were to interview my ex-boyfriend, he would tell you that I’m a psycho! (Laughs) It doesn’t necessarily mean too much to me. I translate it into the fact that she’s opinionated, she’s passionate, she works very hard, she’s ambitious, but she also parties really hard. She’s the master of the art of dodging the truth, in a way that she wants. That manipulation is kind of what makes her sparkle."

In part, the series is about how we navigate Monica and Marty’s relationship.
"[You’ll see] those threads interweaving, and I think what you find it’s evident that they can’t be together, but they almost can’t be apart," she agrees. "So it creates a really interesting story which possibly many people deal with or have dealt with in the past with there’s just that one person, that one guy or that one girl that you just have this very passionate rollercoaster of a relationship with that you love but you also know it’s bad for you. And it’s how much you indulge in that vice. I think it’s just how much you give into that drug."

There was a time when a wonderful role and story were enough to draw Olivieri to a project. Those elements continue to be essential, but working with such a stellar cast is a prerequisite as well. "There is only so much you can do if you're pulling weight and there's nobody there to play off of," she noted to Backstage. "You can't have those beautiful moments with new actors who are so worried about everything else but the moment. With the stellar actors I'm working with now, there's so much more that can blossom."

The actors she's referring to include Cheadle, Kristen Bell, Glynn Turman, Ben Schwartz, and Josh Lawson. The raunchy, dark comedy recounts the nasty shenanigans of a hot management consulting firm, headed by a delightful sleaze played by Cheadle. Olivieri is his pill-popping ex-wife and business competitor, who's at the top of her game in the boardroom and totally messed up in every other aspect of her life. "The show pushes the envelope and people's comfort level, but for me, Dawn, the script is more truthful than most of those I've read and worked on," she continues. "But the acting challenges are the same" whether nudity is required or not. "You try to do what you have in front of you and then dive into that black hole that you're usually covering up."

In that regard, it also doesn't hurt that Shameless comes on right before her show, and Emmy Rossum is topless a lot. "That kind of helps some," thinks Olivieri. "I think TV is going in a way, especially with these networks like Showtime and HBO, where there’s moments that it makes sense. And the nudity is tasteful, and it’s okay. In that scene, in the very opening scene it makes sense that that’s the situation that I’m in. So as long as it’s not gratuitous, then let’s do it. Let’s tell a story."

Television Series: House Of Lies (S01E04)
Release Date: January 2012
Actress: Kristen Bell & Dawn Olivieri
Video Clips Credit: Deep at Sea, Zorg, Wimsey











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Californication S05E04

"Jesus fucking christ. I think you just added seven years to my life..."

Justified star Natalie Zea returned to Californication with a very spirited performance in “Waiting for a Miracle.” Earlier this season, Hank woke up with Kali giving him a blowjob. However, it was only a dream. In this week's episode, he woke up with a real message from his ex-girlfriend Carrie; the girl with the bottomless libido who just wants to get "drunk on cock". After setting fire to his apartment in New York, she was bringing her foul mouth and nutty persona over to the west coast. Specifically, Carrie said that she had a “surprise” for Hank. Shortly after the doorbell rang. Hank went to get it and found an envelope with panties in it. Then, Carrie jumped out from the bushes to surprise him. After her explosive breakup with Hank in the Season 5 premiere, she was in much higher spirits and elated to see her ex.

Carrie's in town for a potential job opportunity (a blond, hapless romantic with a career in print journalism—is that you, Carrie Bradshaw?), but she's really there because she's a sucker for love and thinks maybe, just maybe, Hank has matured enough to give her psycho ass a fair shot this time. But as we all know, Hank only has room in his heart for one woman, and it's not Carrie. "Are we really going to stand here wasting our time with chitchat when we could be fucking each other's brains out?" she asked before the two got down to business. While Carrie was on top, finishing up an orgasm, Hank was lying in bed apathetically. She was basically having sex with herself and Hank’s unthinking erection. Still, she loved it. “It just fits so nicely inside there,” Carrie said before rolling off of Hank and suggested that she would make a plaster cast of his penis, since it was a perfect fit, and then create a dildo from that cast. Hank wasn’t shocked by the comment at all and followed it up with the suggestion that she should make a second one so that he could give it to Charlie. Nice.


All of which only serves to set up Karen’s closing monologue in which she expresses genuine concern for Hank’s pattern of impulsive flings and warns him against holding a torch for their love, as a metaphorical gauntlet for Californication itself. If we, the audience, are waiting for Mr. Moody to lick his wounds, grow up, and move on, or, alternately, woo his ex-wife back into a passionate but destructive tango, we may as well hold vigil for the Virgin Mary.

Television Series: Californication (S05E04)
Release Date: January 2012
Actress: Natalie Zea
Video Clips Credit: Deep at Sea










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Shameless Acting

Actor John Moraitis is often brought in to add both dialogue and sounds to film and television programmes. His latest job, he writes in the Guardian, was to add 'sex noises' to Steve McQueen's explicit film, Shame...

I'm an actor, and when I'm between roles, my bread-and-butter is something called ADR – additional dialogue recording – where I go to a studio and record background conversations for scenes from films in post-production. It's often a restaurant scene. You stand at the microphone with another actor, watch a video of the sequence, pick two characters at a table in the background and improvise.

Last summer, I was invited to do ADR for Shame. At the time, we knew nothing about the film. My agent said: "It involves sexual sounds. Do you mind?" I said: "No, it's just a job. It's fine." The sound engineer kept the sexual stuff till the end. There's a scene where Michael Fassbender's character goes to a gay club. At the back of some shots, couples were at it. So I stood at the microphone with another guy and we improvised. For example: "Yeah. YEAH. Go deeper, GO DEEPER." The sound engineer would say: "OK, a bit more intense, please." You came up with anything you could think of. "Who's your daddy?" Stuff like that.


One of the more entertaining moments came when we had to evoke the sound of a penis entering an open mouth. The engineer was almost embarrassed but we found it amusing. None of us had done anything like that before, but it was a hoot. There was a kind of one-upmanship. The art of ADR is to make the noises blend in, so when I saw the finished film, I couldn't make out my own voice. I thought the film was terrific. I'm not sure how much I cared about the main character, but it was beautifully acted. And the ADR was great.
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Mad Dogs S02E02

Whether reclining naked on a bed expectantly awaiting the attentions of her young lover in Bellas Durmientes, or joyfully straddling her partner in nothing more than a pair of metallic silver knickers in a film that roughly translates as Semen: A Love Story, seductive Spanish actress Leticia Dolera insists "it seems a bit reductive to reduce her work" to the salacious capping of her occasional 'bed scenes'. In an interview with Barcelona daily Elmundo, Dolera states she does not like it when such scenes are taken out of context. "We have much to tell and we have very beautiful and interesting stories that are not based only on sex," she said. "By the way, are you not sick of seeing so much sex in advertising? We use sex to sell cars, cosmetics, food, clothing, etc. .. You are being given a market value and it's a bit tiresome and superficial, in my opinion." Well, given her particularly 'interesting' and 'beautiful' appearance in last night's episode of Mad Dogs, can I just say lo lamento Señorita Dolera for what follows...


Television Series: Mad Dogs (S02E02)
Release Date: January 2012
Actress: Leticia Dolera
Video Clip Credit: Trailblazer











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Damsels In Undress

The nudity clause, once required only in movies, is suddenly becoming a standard part of TV work, reports Sean Daly in today's New York Post. The pressure on young actresses to sign can be tremendous, he writes, and it’s not just on cable anymore...

Behind every boob shot and flash of bare buttocks is a hard working entertainment lawyer because they are usually the one to negotiate Hollywood’s most awkward legal agreement: the nudity clause. "The nudity rider spells out exactly what an actor agrees to do in a role: partial nudity, full frontal nudity — even simulated sex," LA attorney Brian J. Murphy says. The document — usually about one page — can be extremely detailed. It typically includes which body parts can be shown, from which angle and for how long. The nudity clause — once a rarity on TV — is becoming, if not standard, an everyday part of contract negotiations. What is more, it’s starting to show.


Kristen Bell, for example, who came to fame 10 years ago as a crime-solving high school student on Veronica Mars, agreed to work in a bra and panties — but not the 'Full Monty' — in the new sex-filled Showtime drama House of Lies. She’s now 31. Shows like NBC’s Playboy Club negotiated detailed nudity riders with key actors to cover scenes filmed for DVD or overseas use. "You have to be careful not to put yourself in a position where you might be taken advantage of," says 19 year-old Vanessa Marano of ABC Family’s Switched at Birth. "Especially if you are not a series regular and you are just a woman going in for a guest spot on cable, they will expect you to take it off. I did Dexter, and there were people naked everywhere on that. I was safe because I was underage, but if I were older, my clothes would have probably had to come off."

Bare breasts and simulated sex have been essential ingredients on pay cable shows like The Sopranos, Sex and the City and Californication for years. Now the four broadcast networks may soon be able to show a lot more skin in prime time, depending on whether the US Supreme Court decides the FCC can no longer regulate against “indecency” — a vague term that can cover anything from a fleeting F-bomb to a deliberate flash of a backside.”

The networks — which have been consistently losing ground to cable, which is unregulated, in the ratings ­— have been complaining for years about the two-standard system. No matter. The ruling has pushed the issue of pressure on actors to strip down to get the part to the front burner. Shonda Rhimes — creator of Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice — insists nobody is forced to disrobe on her steamy ABC shows. “We will write in a love scene, and if somebody says ‘I want to do this love scene while wearing a turtleneck and snow pants,’ we will say ‘fine,’ ” she tells The Post. “If somebody wants to do it completely naked, that is great, too.”

John Wells, producer of the sexually charged Showtime series Shameless, is less flexible. “We are very clear [upfront] that nudity will be required,” he says. “We don’t hire actors who tell us they are not comfortable doing it.” Yet Wells may not be able to fire any of his stars for refusing to strip down. “The performer has the right to refuse to do [nudity] once they have agreed to do it,” says Screen Actors Guild rep Elizabeth Moseley. “Basically, it is not binding. If the performer changes their mind, the producer (only) has the right to use a body double.”
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Thank You, My Lady

Playing the future Queen of England really does pay off. British actress Camilla Luddington, (in)famous for portraying Kate Middleton in the tepid Lifetime telefilm William & Kate, has just debuted in a meaty role on Showtime’s racy series Californication. The 28-year-old English rose takes on the role of a fired nanny who is then hired by Charlie (Evan Handler) and Marcy (Pamela Adlon) in an eight-episode arc. She seems innocent at first but turns out to be a manipulative little schemer.

Unfortunately for Luddington, the nature of the show means marrying into the actual royal family is most certainly going to be off the agenda now. "I wouldn't be able to handle that — or get naked on Californication," she told Esquire, "that would probably not be allowed." We're talking pretty rude then? "I have to get topless and you definitely see my butt in a lot of stuff," admits Luddington. "I mean, it's a sexy show — there's obviously sex scenes and there's nudity. I don't think Kate Middleton would get away with that. They have this thing: a privacy patch. It's slightly horrifying. It's basically like a panty liner that's skin-colored and it sticks to you — which is definitely, by the way, not fun to take off. But it protects the areas that need to be protected; they frame the cameras so you can't see it. But you're walking around and that's the only thing you have on. You're almost like, should I even bother wearing this?"


It would certainly seem to take you out of the moment. "You have to feel sexy — even if you feel vulnerable in front of the camera," she continues. "Because the reality is when you're in an intimate moment with someone and you're having sex or you're kissing or making out, for me personally, I'm not thinking, Oh my gosh, am I skinny enough? You have to get lost in the moment. I definitely have curves. I don't intend on losing them. It's not like I have the most perfect body in the world. I'm a normal girl. I have my hang-ups, but I sort of had to throw caution to the wind and be like, OK, I'm just going to show you what I've got."

Luddington admits she's had "a couple of naughty beach moments when it's dark and you're definitely not supposed to be there, which makes it a little more fun; you feel the breeze..." but it was the first time she had been naked on screen. "It was the first time I'd ever done nudity," says the Ascot, Berkshire-born actress. "It's written into the contract that I signed that I'm okay to do it. I thought, 'Maybe I'll be the one character, like a nun, who doesn't sleep with anyone all season.' Of course, that doesn't happen. I was so naive. But it turned out I was surprisingly comfortable with it. At the end of the day, you just kind of have to let go of all your inhibitions and all your hang-ups and be free with it and have fun with it," she says. Besides, "Everyone on the set has seen it a thousand times."

Speaking to the National Ledger, Luddington also credits Duchovny, who told her, "Anything you're uncomfortable with, call me or the director and we'll work around it.' A camera angle, a shot, anything whatever." The actress is equally adept at British and American accents but says she chose to go into Californication meetings carrying on in the English way, "to stand out a little bit. The lines sounded almost more ridiculous that way, talking about sexually explicit things with a proper British accent." Of course, the Californication team was well-aware of her Kate Middleton performance, too. She's often been called "Your Highness" around the set. "There's even a part at one point where I do a little curtsey and say, 'Thank you, my lord.' I think they wrote it in as a playful little wink."

Californication stars Duchovny as has-been novelist Hank Moody, who is struggling to revitalize his professional career while maintaining a good relationship with his ex-wife and teenage daughter. Showtime renewed the veteran dark comedy for a fifth season in January. As well as Luddington, Meagan Good will be stopping by for eight episodes this time around, and hip-hop musician RZA will also be returning.
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Shameless S02E03

When Showtime premiered "Shameless" in January 2011, its graphic depictions of sex and sexuality immediately drew a lot of attention. And as the series progressed, it never shied away from that side of it storytelling and Emmy Rossum is happy about it. On "The Rosie Show" she talked about why she thinks the sex scenes aren't gratuitous...

"If we're gonna show poverty and depression and anger and joy that you get from being around your family ... and how would people try to be together?" she explained, emphasizing the tiny house shared by these eight family members. "So I think it's kind of interesting." If it didn't serve the realism of this darkly comic story they're trying to tell, she might not support it. That doesn't mean sex scenes aren't inherently awkward though. Rosie O'Donnell talked about the sex scene she had with Julian McMahon on "Nip/Tuck" and the infamous "sock" male actors have to wear in such scenes. Rossum then opened up about her "Shameless" co-star Justin Chatwin's first time experiencing one on their set. "Rumor has it he actually filled it with sand so it would -- in case he got excited at all during it-- hold it down," she laughed.


Now it’s summertime on the Southside for Shameless' second season and it sees the Gallagher family more than surviving a sweltering summer. "The Gallaghers thrive in the summer," Emmy Rossum tells TVGuide.com. "They make a lot of money that they put and stash to keep them going through the winter." In fact, the entire family is pretty busy. "Lip and Kev run the ice cream truck, which sells a lot more than ice cream," Rossum says. "Fiona's gotten a job with Veronica at this cool nightclub where she makes a lot of money in tips as a waitress and there's bottle service and stuff like that. She works at night and sleeps during the day. The [rest of the] kids run this successful daycare service out of the house, which Fiona at least appears to be running for the parents because she's there for pickup and dropoff, but she's really sleeping most of the day."

Relationship-wise, following her failed relationship with Steve (Chatwin), Fiona is 'playing the field'. "She's been doing a little bit of nursing her wounds about Steve, and she's getting back out there," Rossum says. "She's clearly been through the grieving period, and is now a little boy crazy. We're going to see her push it a little too far, make some mistakes and hook up with some people she really shouldn't have, and then have to pay the price for that." In case you're wondering- and you really shouldn't be- "playing the field" means lots of sex. And nudity -- this is Showtime, after all. Rossum says she never thought twice about the risque nature of the show. She stressed to TV fanatic that “my number one priority is focusing on the material, to make sure the scenes really land and the character dynamic works. Fiona isn’t the kind of girl who sits around on the elliptical or stairmaster.”

Besides, she argues, "if we're showing alcoholism and poverty and domestic violence in the way that we are -- in an honest way -- then why wouldn't we show nudity and sexuality in an open and honest way? I hate when you see a scene and a girl wakes up and she looks gorgeous and her eyeliner is still perfect and she's wearing a $300 La Perla bra. Nobody wakes up like that. Fiona certainly can't." In fact, Rossum says, "In the first season we had a theory that Fiona didn't even own a bra. So every time Fiona was wearing a sweater or a T-shirt it was kind of baggy like she couldn't afford a bra. Now we're shooting summer, so we didn't have a choice this year. We had to go with bras. Fiona bought a bra."

In the season premiere, we met the first of three new guys hoping to coax Fiona out of said underwear, played by "Lonestar" leading man James Wolk, whom Rossum dubs "Steve 2.0. "He's dark and a little bit of a fast, about-town kind of guy," Rossum says. "He's an investment banker. He and Fiona are definitely just having fun -- I don't know how much they connect on an emotional level. I think it's just kind of a physical, fun relationship. He even looks like Steve, but he doesn't have the danger factor so she's not as actually interested in him. We see that she's not really willing to open up."

"Vampire Diaries" star Taylor Kinney will pop up in later episodes as past high school infatuation Craig, Rossum says. "He is the guy that she was always crushing on in high school, but he's married now. With kids. Very complicated." Plus, she says, "There's another guy who's going to come on in addition to those two who's older and a different type and they don't mesh together at all, so it's interesting to see how much she really did love Steve and she does feel that a part of herself is missing."

Talking of which, Steve will be back and we'll be seeing plenty of him. "As the season progresses we'll definitely find out where Steve went and what he's doing now, but I think it'll take a lot for Steve and Fiona to be back together," Rossum confesses. "I don't know if we'll see that very soon." Not only does he return in the nude, but later in the season he'll be wearing a thong on a yacht full of women. Steve, of course, isn't the only one in the buff, but that's the nature of a show with the title Shameless, Rossum says. "This is a house with very thin walls. The kids are growing up and they have bodies. Little Liam is 2 years old and is getting stiffies in the mornings, so everyone's in everyone's business. There is a certain amount of over-share and of comfortability that they have with each other and themselves that lends itself to a certain amount of nudity."

At the end of Season 1, newcomer Jasmine (Amy Smart) implanted herself into Fiona's life, much to the chagrin of Veronica (Shanola Hampton). Their continued friendship over the summer, and the influence Jasmine has over Fiona, will drive a wedge between the longtime friends. "Veronica really hates Jasmine and really doesn't understand what Jasmine wants from Fiona," Rossum says. "We'll get to see more of the intention of Jasmine and how Fiona deals with that."

Frank (William H. Macy) will also be back to his old tricks — the least of which include getting Liam kidnapped and trying to marry a woman on her death bed. Fiona will also discover she "has Frank's DNA in her body and if she's not careful, she can make the wrong decision and end up being chased by somebody with a baseball bat and hiding under tables just like him," Rossum says. "Of course that's Frank's proudest moment, but this is all too horrifying for Fiona."

Instead, Fiona will focus on herself -- a strange experience for someone who's never really thought about her role in life other than caretaker to her siblings. "She wants to know what else she could have in life," Rossum says. "The kids are growing up a little bit, so she is able to take more control of her life. But there's a stress in that too, because she hasn't had to focus on herself. Sometimes it's easier not to focus on yourself and what your own goals are and to put that off onto other people." Rossum continues: "She has to start evaluating, as the kids get older, who she is aside from this mother figure. We'll see her think about going back to school and trying to get her GED. She's definitely a hard worker, but she doesn't feel as if she's book smart at all. It's interesting to see her struggle through that and to see her navigate the waters of being single and playing that field."

Television Series: Shameless US (S02E03)
Release Date: January 2012
Actress: Emmy Rossum, Laura Wiggins & Molly Price
Video Clips Credit: Deep at Sea, Zorg, Wimsey



















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