Greta Scacchi: Sex scenes used to be beautiful ... now they're just odd

Telegraph

4 hours ago

Sex scenes have degenerated from soft focus and beautiful in the 1980s to 'explicit rutting' today, according to Greta Scacchi.
The actress, who made her name playing a string of femmes fatales, said the portrayal of sex had changed for the worse and was now an ugly thing to watch.
'In my 20s, the female voice was still struggling to emerge, directors were mostly male and simulated love-making was obligatory. But in the '80s, it was soft focus and made to look beautiful and slowed down, whereas now I find it really gratuitous – this explicit rutting stuff is very odd to see.
'I find it so uninteresting, ugly and very compromising for the actors,' said 65-year-old Scacchi.
'It sounds funny coming from me, because I got labelled for nudity and sex scenes, but I don't believe it was a deserved label.'
Speaking to Radio Times, the British-Italian star of White Mischief and Presumed Innocent said that she would not have benefited from an intimacy coordinator when she started her career.
'No, I don't at all. Actors don't want to be choreographed into positions unless there's a real antipathy or a communication problem. Luckily, I didn't have that.
'Charles Dance on White Mischief was a very disciplined actor and so am I – we could talk and be frank,' she said.
'We were both, at the time, very beautiful and confident about ourselves physically. He was always very considerate and made sure I was comfortable.'
Scacchi said the only discomfort she ever felt was with voyeuristic directors.
'That's where you need the intimacy coordinator,' she said.
Her children were teased over her sex scenes, and the actress speculated that it must be '100 times worse for the kids today' because such scenes can be taken out of context and plastered all over social media.
She turned down the chance to star in Basic Instinct, rejecting it as a 'male fantasy'. The role went to Sharon Stone.
Scacchi is now appearing in Darby and Joan, a cosy crime drama in which she plays a widowed English nurse who teams up with an Australian ex-detective, played by Bryan Brown.
The pair have a will-they-won't-they relationship, but Scacchi said she and Brown had refused to entertain the idea of a love scene, given the age of their characters.
She revealed that there was tension between the actors and the writers, because the latter wanted to 'sneak a French kiss into an episode' and had also written a scene in which the two share a bed platonically on one occasion.
Scacchi explained: 'If you're in your 60s or 70s and you have a kiss or a spoon, the landscape would change forever. The writer was saying, 'We don't want to show these people as being old and unable to enjoy a one-night stand,' and I said, 'Well, we don't enjoy a one-night stand'.
'One day, Bryan and I saw there was an intimacy coordinator booked and we had to say, 'Sorry, you've come under false pretences. It's not happening.''