Sex scenes really aren’t as sexy as you think
Jake Gyllenhaal recently described filming his sex scenes with Jennifer Aniston as “torture”.
Speaking on The Howard Stern Show about his new film, The Guilty, the 40-year-old actor admitted that, like many over the past 20 years or so, he had a huge crush on the Friends star at the time.
However, as he’s alluded to before, the experience of pretending to have sex with her wasn’t great.
When prompted by the radio host and podcaster, who asked: “it was torture for you, right?”, the actor replied: “Oh yeah, it was torture, yes it was but was also not torture, I mean, come on – it was like a mix of both”.
You can see the full clip below:
The film they starred alongside each other in was called The Good Girl, a romantic dramedy from 2002 which follows two lovers who are bored in their dead-end cash register jobs at a discount store and end up embarking on an affair.
Naturally, the plot leads to them having intercourse – but while it might sound great cosying up to someone you fancy, doing so on a movie set is something different entirely.
As Gyllenhaal explains: “Love scenes are awkward because there are maybe 30-50 people watching it” and even if it’s on a closed set with fewer people “that doesn’t turn [him] on”.
He went on to say that most of the time it’s “weirdly mechanical” and more like “a dance […] you’re choreographing for a camera”. He also added that although it is possible to get into the moment, both parties are wary of each other’s comfort.
Like in so many sex scenes over the years, he said the pair used “the pillow technique” (where a pillow is positioned between actors to create the illusion of sex) after Aniston’s suggestion, adding that she was “very kind to suggest that before we began”.
He certainly isn’t the first person to have revealed the awkward and uncomfortable truth behind sex scenes, with Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, Jamie Dornan and more all having voiced their feeling about their ‘intimate’ on-screen moments.
The Guilty is out now on Netflix and is currently sitting at 70 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.
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