17 Intimate Scenes That Look Wildly Different Once You Know The Behind‑The‑Scenes Chaos

Kim Cattrall has played one of the most open and adventurous characters on television when it comes to intimacy, reportedly filming over 100 love scenes as Samantha Jones in Sex and the City.

But that does not mean they all went without any hiccups. 

In 2016, Cattrall opened up about it in an interview with the Today newspaper, saying, “There were so many scripts I thought, ‘How the hell am I going to do that?’ I had gone where no woman had ever gone before.”

A year later, she appeared on Piers Morgan's Life Stories in October 2017, where she detailed her experience of filming an intimate scene for Sex and the City that turned out to be “gross.”

“We were doing the scene, and he is on top of me, and then he collapsed, and then he farted,” she told Morgan as the talk show audience roared with laughter. “And I thought, ‘Is this an acting choice he has made?’ I didn't really understand what was going on.”

“What had happened was he had been working out so much, and so frantically, and had been on a diet, that he had forgotten to eat, and when he fell on me he passed out,” Cattrall recalled. “It was pretty gross.”

Of course, Cattrall did not reveal the actor's name, but netizens speculated whether it was Jason Lewis, who played Samantha’s most famous and devoted long-term partner, Jerry “Smith” Jerrod.

Cattrall also shared with Morgan why she turned down the role of Samantha Jones three times. 

“At 41, I didn’t want to put myself out there and be ridiculed,” she said, pointing at the prevalence of “ageism everywhere” at the time. 

She was specifically hesitant to have the reputation of “being an older woman preying on younger men” attached to her, but in the end, she changed her mind for the sake of “self-empowerment.”

Many fans did not see it that way. While Samantha is a widely loved character, some thought that Cattrall was deliberately “humiliated” by the creators, especially in the movies.

“I always thought Kim Cattrall had a disproportionately high number of s** scenes with partial or full nu**ty,” one person said. 

Another wrote, “I feel like her character was always made a mockery of.” A third wrote, “The second movie’s portrayal of Samantha was just awful and unbearable.”

A decade after Titanic, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio reunited for Winslet’s then-husband Sam Mendes’ 2008 drama, Revolutionary Road. 

In the movie, DiCaprio and Winslet play Frank and April Wheeler, an American suburban couple whose marriage is steadily deteriorating. 

Winslet was initially eager to share the screen with her best friend of 10 years again and even helped Mendes rope DiCaprio into the project.

“Leo and I have such a history together, and I couldn’t imagine not being able to apply that to this story and these characters,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2008.

“I hadn't realized how much my chemistry with him since Titanic would still stick. It's great to discover we can just slip right into it, like muscle memory.”

DiCaprio agreed with her sentiment. 

“I just thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be a wonderful experience to do it with Kate?” the Inception actor revisited his thoughts after reading the script.

But things quickly got awkward, as the comfort of their friendship proved to be counterproductive when it came to filming the love scenes, especially with Mendes behind the camera. 

“I just kept saying, ‘This is too f***ing weird,’ and Leo was like, ‘Oh, get over it,’” Winslet recalled. “I was going, ‘Yeah, a little reminder: You’re my best friend. He’s my husband. This is a bit weird.”

“I will admit it was quite bizarre to direct my wife in how to make love,” Mendes chimed in. “But it’s difficult whether you’re married to a person or not.”

In 2024, Winslet championed the role of on-set intimacy coordinators in an interview with The New York Times, saying, “I would have benefited from an intimacy coordinator every single time I had to do a love scene or be partially n**ed or even a kissing scene. It would have been nice to have had someone in my corner, because I always had to stand up for myself.”

Florence Pugh played Jean Tatlock in Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award-winning film, Oppenheimer. Her character has a long-term relationship with Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer) before and during his marriage to Emily Blunt’s Kitty.

During a panel discussion moderated by actor Jamie Dornan, Pugh revealed that they had an equipment mishap during one of her and Murphy’s intimate scenes. 

“In the middle of our s** scene, the camera broke,” Pugh said. “No one knows this, but it did. Our camera broke when we were both n**ed, and it was not ideal timing.”

“Cillian and I are in this room together. It’s a closed set, so we’re both holding our bodies like this,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself.

Pugh added that there were not many cameras available at the time, with one being in the shop, and the crew had to figure out how to fix the one that broke while the actors waited. But Pugh seized this opportunity and turned it into a learning moment. 

“I’m like, well, this is my moment to learn. ‘So tell me, what’s wrong with this camera?’” she recalled asking the technician who arrived to fix the camera. “You just make your moments. I’m like, ‘What’s going on with the shutter here, buddy?’”

Nolan explained to her that there was an issue with how the light was entering. 

Some netizens said the situation was “unprofessional,” while many others found the entire scene “unnecessary,” especially in a film about the Manhattan Project.

Pugh had another awkward experience while filming a love scene with Andrew Garfield for the 2024 John Crowley drama We Live in Time. 

Garfield revealed that during a “very intimate, passionate” scene, both of them could not hear when the director yelled “cut,” causing them to keep going and forcing the camera and boom operator, the only other people in the room, to turn away.

In general, Pugh has always been open and vocal about filming intimate scenes. 

In a 2025 appearance on the Louis Theroux Podcast, she said that she has had both good and bad experiences with intimacy coordinators. 

“I am quite confident, quite happy in my skin, and I’ve always been able to make sure that I’m heard,” she said. “That being said … there are plenty of things I remember that were completely inappropriate – to be asked to do that, to be directed in that way.”

“But my view is changing about it as well, because I’m now having fantastic experiences with intimacy coordinators. However, that being said, I’ve also had a s**t example where someone just made it so weird and so awkward and really wasn’t helpful and kind of was just like wanting to be a part of the set in a way that wasn’t helpful.”

“It’s a job that’s still figuring itself out,” she added.

Fans of Bridgerton go into every season of the series anticipating a ton of steamy scenes, and the showrunners deliver on their expectations. 

However, filming them can get quite chaotic. 

In the show’s third season, childhood friends Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton) and Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) finally profess their love to each other, and despite initial disagreements over Penelope’s Lady Whistledown alter ego, they get together in a rather satisfying manner. 

But during their first intimate scene, the furniture they were on completely gave way in less than half a minute.

“So, we’re on the chaise longue (a settee)... It’s the mirror scene, and our director at the time took a step back and said, ‘Right. Let’s just mix it up, this take, and let’s really sort of go for this one. Let’s up the energy basically, and up the stakes,’” Newton told Vanity Fair in 2024. 

“Then I think we were maybe 20 seconds in and one of the legs just completely snapped off.”

“We both burst into laughter,” Newton went on. “Then Nicola shrieked and said something in her natural [Irish] accent. I was really hoping the laugh would kind of make it in, and it did.”

The broken furniture was then propped up by apple boxes to secure it while they continued filming.

Newton also shared his experience of baring it all for the first time in front of his co-star. 

“I remember when I first put on my intimacy wear, and it’s unusual to look at — it’s just a sort of cup, bag-shaped thing that you wear,” he recalled. “I was wearing a dressing gown, and we were just about to do the first take when Colin undre**ed.”

“I just said to Nic, ‘I need to show you this before we roll because you are going to lose it on camera if you don’t.’ So, we had a little giggle,” Newton added.

“It was nice to be able to be light-hearted about it. And that scene, we shot over three days, so by day three, we were literally throwing the robes off and strutting around the studio.”

Margot Robbie filmed her first “proper” intimate scene in Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film, The Wolf of Wall Street.

Robbie played Naomi Lapaglia, the non-nonsense wife of DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort, a shady Wall Street stockbroker. From having a full-frontal scene to seducing Jordan in their baby’s nursery, Robbie had quite a few racy scenes in the film. 

Incidentally, some were her own ideas. But a few of those scenes put her in awkward situations, and one even left her injured. 

“I got a million paper cuts on my back from all that money! It’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” Robbie told The Daily Beast in 2014 about her and DiCaprio’s love scene on a pile of cash. 

“Maybe real money is a bit softer, but the fake money is like paper, and when I got up off the bed, I turned around to get my robe, and everyone gasped. I said, ‘What is it?’ And they said, ‘You look like you’ve been whipped a million times. Your back is covered in a thousand red scratches.’”

In another anecdote, Robbie shared that DiCaprio hid his e-ci**rette under a pillow before filming an intimate scene, only for it to end up in the wrong place.

“It was like, in my b**t crack. I’m sitting on it. I’m so sorry,” Robbie recalled the moment. 

Regardless of how they look on screen, the behind-the-scenes details are far less glamorous.

“It doesn’t come across when you’re watching the movie, but in reality, we’re in a tiny bedroom with 30 crew members crammed in,” Robbie said. “For 17 hours, I’m pretending to be touching myself. It’s just a bizarre thing, and you have to bury the embarrassment and absurdity deep and fully commit.”

Commitment to the role was never an issue for Robbie. In fact, she insisted on her memorable full-frontal scene despite Scorsese's suggestion that she could cover up with a robe if she weren’t comfortable. 

“But that’s not what she would do in that scene,” Robbie said in a 2024 appearance on the Talking Pictures podcast. “The whole point is that she’s going to come out completely n**ed — that’s the card she’s playing right now.”

At the peak of his Mad Men fame, Jon Hamm made an uncredited cameo appearance in Paul Feig’s 2011 comedy-romance, Bridesmaids. He plays Ted, the self-centered casual fling of lead protagonist Annie Walker, played by SNL’s Kristen Wiig. 

The two share a few graphic but hilariously written love scenes, which were made even “weird and uncomfortable” by Hamm and Wiig’s friendship. 

“I mean, sure, there’s an awkwardness about being in a weird flesh-colored thong, bouncing on top of an actress,” Hamm said in 2012.

“But it’s like running in the rain. There’s a certain point where you go, ‘F**k it, I’m already wet. I’m not going to get any less wet, so I might as well just enjoy how this feels.’”

“You’re in that moment, and it’s happening, and it’s not going to get any better, so you might as well enjoy it,” he added. 

To make things easier for Wiig, Hamm came up with a secret code.

“I am not a small human being,” the actor said. “I weigh at least 200 pounds, and I’m six-foot-two, and Wiig is a twig. She’s a skinny little thing. I told her, ‘Just punch me in the side if I’m hurting you.’”

The film came up during Hamm and Wiig’s Variety Studio: Actors on Actors in June 2024. They recalled filming the intimate scenes on the last day of shooting, and everyone wanted to leave while they were “goofing around.”

“I definitely felt the last-day energy,” Hamm recalled. “And we could not keep it together remotely. It was the dumbest.

“It was so fun because it was so loose: ‘What if we do this? What if we try this?’” Wiig chimed in.

“Paul Feig was yelling s** instructions: ‘Put her leg over your shoulder!’… We’re in n**ed bodysuits. Dumb and fun,” Hamm added. 

Around the same time, Hamm also appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers and recalled an SNL sketch in which he played a fictional senator, Scott Brown, and Wiig was Nancy Pelosi. 

“At a certain point, I was supposed to spill something on her and touch her b**bs,” revealed Hamm. “And I was so terrified to do that… but she was like, ‘Go to town!’”

A few years before gracing the silver screen as Superman/Clark Kent in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, Henry Cavill played King Henry VIII’s brother-in-law, courtier, and quite a womanizer in Showtime’s The Tudors. 

The show required Cavill to film several intimate scenes, one of which proved particularly awkward for the British actor. 

In a 2015 interview with Men’s Fitness, Cavill was asked if he ever got into an uncomfortable situation on the set of the Tudor dynasty drama. 

“It has happened to me once… and it was very embarrassing,” Cavill admitted. “A girl had to be on top of me. She had spectacular br**sts, and I hadn’t rearranged my stuff into a harmless position.”

“She’s basically rubbing herself all over me, um, it got a bit hard. I had to apologize profusely afterward. It’s not great when you’re in a professional acting environment, and somebody gets a b**er, is it? No, not acceptable.”

Actress Selma Brook, who played noblewoman Brigitte Rousselot on the show and filmed an intimate scene with Cavill, said in 2015 that he was “a gentleman” about it, and the two grabbed coffee beforehand to break the ice. 

“When we shot that scene, it was quite a laugh,” she said. “S** scenes on screen are the opposite of what they look like. It is very professional and choreographed, with the director shouting out, ‘Henry, put your hand on her left b**b!’”

Fans have often found the racy scenes in The Tudors, especially of Cavill’s, to be “unnecessary” and “gratuitous.”

Cavill himself is “not a fan” of excessive intimate scenes in films and TV shows. 

In 2024, The Witcher actor said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, “There are circumstances where a s** scene actually is beneficial to a movie, rather than just the audience, but I think sometimes they’re overused these days.”

“It’s when you have a sense where you’re going, ‘Is this really necessary or is it just people with less clothing on?’ And that’s when you start to get more uncomfortable, and you’re thinking, ‘There’s not a performance here. There’s not a piece that is going to carry through to the rest of the movie.’”

James Bond films are well known for their intimate encounters, and one such scene was made far worse for Rosamund Pike by a modesty garment faux pas. 

Pike plays Miranda Frost in 2002’s Die Another Day, which featured Pierce Brosnan as the legendary British spy. 

Appearing on The Kelly Clarkson Show in 2025, Pike revealed that a love scene she had to film with Brosnan in the movie was her most embarrassing professional moment. She was 21 when the movie was filmed, and Brosnan was 48 and “sort of an icon” after having played 007 thrice. 

She explained that they were doing “this sort of tumble in an ice palace and I had all this modesty stuff, that they tape up your b**bs and tape every bit of you with this kind of double-sided sticky tape. I had never seen it before.”

“We came apart from this clinch, and I looked down to check these sticky things were still in place, and they were covered in hair,” Pike continued. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve waxed Pierce Brosnan’s chest with my b**b tape!’ And I was like, ‘This is so bad, poor guy!’”

The hair on the tapes turned out to be the “furry rugs” that they were lying on.

“They were fake fur, and I thought that I was just getting more and more covered in Pierce's chest hair, which, if we were doing the movie now, he wouldn't have, would he?” Pike mused. 

Earlier in 2015, Pike detailed the behind-the-scenes of another one of her intimate sequences.

Speaking to Glamour magazine about 2014’s Gone Girl, she said that her character, Amy Dunne, goes to “this very dark place” during a love scene with her ex-boyfriend, Desi Collings, played by Neil Patrick Harris. 

“I tried to get us out of that,” Pike recalled. “Neil was incredible at that. We were hysterics in the editing room.”

She added that the director, David Fincher, left her and Harris alone on the set for two hours to ensure the actors were sufficiently accustomed to film the scene. 

“But when it's just two of you, basically kind of [doing it] on a bed, it feels so inappropriate,” she added.

Ryan Reynolds admitted that he may have crossed a line with castmate Olivia Wilde while filming 2011’s fantasy comedy, The Change-Up.

In an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Reynolds recalled that while filming an intimate scene, Wilde’s alleged customization of her modesty gear made him forget his lines. 

“So, in the scene, she’s sitting there, and I take her top off and the b** off, and she has those pasties on, but she’s drawn these adorable little smiley faces on them, and I forget every line in the scene — not just from this movie but from every other movie I’ve done,” Reynolds said.

But that was not all.

“At some point in the scene, she takes my hands and puts them on her breasts,” the Deadpool actor said. “So, they’re there, palms a little sweaty. I don’t know what’s happening. … And I’m trying not to look at her like a 14-year-old boy that just won the lady lottery.”

What followed was a modesty-gear botch, made worse by Reynold’s improvised intervention. 

“I take my hands away, and I look down at my hands, and there are two frickin’ smiley faces on them, and I have no idea what to do,” he revealed.

“The scene is over now. … And I reflexively, like an idiot, just put my hands right back on her breasts. And I think I’m doing it to cover them up, but I’m realizing now that it’s a very fine line between chivalry and, you know, workplace se**al a**ault.”

Over the years, many have called Reynolds out over this incident, alleging that it was indeed a workplace violation. 

“The fact that he said he put his hands BACK on her breasts even after they finished shooting is basically a confession of SA,” one person recently said after the interview resurfaced during Reynolds and his wife, Blake Lively’s, legal drama with Justin Baldoni. 

Lizzy Caplan plays Virginia Johnson in Showtime’s drama series Masters of Sex, starring opposite Michael Sheen’s Dr. William Masters. Both are researchers at Washington University, conducting groundbreaking research on human intimacy.
 
In 2014, Caplan appeared on Conan O’Brien’s talk show and opened up about the first love scene that the two of them filmed for the show. 

“It was weird the first time I took my clothes off with Michael Sheen...we’re getting all hooked up on science talk and the science of s**, which is what the show is all about,” Caplan recalled.

“I was scared mainly because he was my friend at that point and I don’t conduct myself in that way with my friends generally,” she continued. “But he was very professional, and I’m someone who can be professional, and I thought, ‘It’ll be fine.’ Also, it was a pivotal scene for the show, and it was necessary.”

“I begin the unbuttoning of the blouse, and I notice that I’m very nervous and my hands are shaking. Then I grab his hands, and I notice his hands are shaking and a little clammy, and he looks bad and nervous and shaky, and it’s making me feel a little better.”

But the worst was yet to come. In fact, it came after the sequence was over.

“We complete the scene, I place my hand on my breast, and they yell cut, and he immediately walks over to a garbage can and throws up,” Caplan said. 

The Mean Girls actress admitted that her self-confidence “plummeted to the ground” watching Sheen throw up: “I realized I’m a monster and anyone who touches me is going to immediately start vomiting and that’s the way it’s going to be.”

She later learned that Sheen had a stomach bug, but in the moment, she had “no way to digest that in a reasonable way.”

“I thought it was a direct cause and effect situation,” she confessed. 

Sienna Miller starred as Emma Gould, the mistress of a Boston crime boss, in Ben Affleck's 2016 gangster drama, Live by Night, which featured him in the lead role of World War I veteran Joe Coughlin. 

To bring Dennis Lehane’s 2012 novel to life, the two had to film several love scenes, which Miller found “hysterical.

“Ben and I are like brother and sister, thank god, so there was no awkwardness, ” she told E! News at the time. “There was just a lot of stupid giggling. He's very professional. I am not, but he is. In that environment, it was a cool scene.”

“There was a montage in the script saying we did it everywhere: in the car, in the bar… I was like, ‘That's an entire day of just love scenes! Okay. How do we do this?’” Miller revisited. 

“Obviously, by the time nine hours of it had gone past, I was shaking with tears running down my face. I mean, I can't tell you—but you have to laugh. Ben is just professional. It is what it is.”

At one point, Miller misunderstood a directorial strategy by Affleck, in which he instructed the director of photography, Robert Richardson, to “keep rolling” so they could film the intimate scenes “a few times” without cutting. 

“I was like, ‘Okay, obviously Joe Coughlin is a real performer,’” Miller joked. “This happened three times, and by the third, I said, ‘Are you joking? I don’t know what you’re trying to tell people, Ben, about your s**ual prowess and abilities.”

“It turns out that he was just giving himself options without cutting,” Miller added. “But to me, it was the funniest thing. I was like, ‘No one can do what you're doing, the marathon love scene.’”

Miller was laughing so hard at Affleck that she had to “walk out of the room” with “tears running down” her face, she recalled. 

In 2022, Miller appeared on The Drew Barrymore Show and once again recalled the film.

“We had zero chemistry whatsoever,” Miller revealed, referring to her and Affleck’s sibling-like relationship. “We were supposed to be in love. We could not be less attracted to each other, which was hysterical.”

The British period comedy drama Rivals saw David Tennant play television royalty, Lord Anthony Baddinham. 

Talking about the “physically amorous” show in a 2025 episode of The Morning, Tennant recalled how he suffered an accidental injury while filming an intimate scene. 

“I was launching myself onto a wooden bed at one point, and unfortunately, my knee collided with the bed frame in a rather unfortunate way,” he told co-host Ben Shephard. 

“Not very s**y,” the Doctor Who alum quipped. 

Tennant added that he was wearing nothing but a modesty pouch when the incident occurred.

“You never quite tell when you're going to sort of fall over and embarrass yourself, can you? But you certainly don't want to do it when you're wearing a sort of modesty pouch to try s**,” he further said.

Craig Johnson’s 2017 comedy-drama Wilson featured a love scene between Judy Greer and Woody Harrelson. 

Before the rehearsal, Greer tried to hype herself up, but she went further than the director expected. 

“I’m not gonna be shy, I’m not gonna be ashamed,” Greer recalled talking to herself in a 2017 interview with People magazine. “I’m gonna really do my full performance here for this rehearsal so everyone knows what I’m gonna do.”

But after the rehearsal, Johnson approached her discreetly and said, “I don’t think she’s that into it.”

“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, never again,” Greer said. “I’m so embarrassed. I’m so mortified.”

Greer revealed that she never discussed the incident with Harrelson: “I was trying to pretend like it never happened.”

Greer had a very different experience with George Clooney, with whom she has starred in two films. 

1999’s Three Kings featured a “crazy s** scene,” and The Descendants had a kissing sequence, and Greer felt quite comfortable with the Ocean’s Eleven actor both times. 

In fact, she found the kissing experience “awesome,” even though they filmed many takes. Greer admitted to Entertainment Tonight that she thought it was “one of Clooney’s infamous on-set pranks.”

“At some point, I thought George was playing a joke on me because we did so many takes of it and we didn't really do many takes of anything else,” she said.

Emilia Clarke is no stranger to being bare-bodied on screen. 

She went shirtless as Daenerys Targaryen from the very first episode of Game of Thrones, though she later admitted she felt pressured to do several such scenes on the HBO show. 

More recently, Clarke filmed intimate scenes with multiple co-stars for the 2026 Cold War spy-thriller TV show Ponies, and in one, she broke a rib. 

Clarke and co-star Haley Lu Richardson play female CIA agents, and their missions include seducing high-level KGB operatives, which means they “really made out a bunch,” the actresses said.

One day of filming involved “three men, in a number of hours,” Clarke recalled to The Wrap. “Just keep bringing it — I’m going to sit on this thing, you’re going to bring them in, we’re going to pretend to have s**. I broke a rib that day.”

“She really did,” Richardson confirmed. “She’s such a tiny little sensitive body. It meant she broke a rib.”

“It didn’t, like, fully break. It just popped out a little bit,” Clarke reassured her fans and Richardson.

Clarke has previously recalled that her Game of Thrones co-star Jason Momoa, who plays her on-screen husband, Khal Drogo, helped her during the intimidating love scenes, which in turn made her aware of what to expect and what to ask for in the future.

“I'd been on a film set twice before then, and now I'm on a film set completely n**ed with all these people,” she said on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast in 2019.

“It was definitely hard, which is why the scenes, when I got to do them with Jason, were wonderful because he was like, ‘No, sweetie, this is not okay,’ and I was like, ‘Oh.’”

“He took care of me, he really did, in an environment where I didn't know I needed to be taken care of,” she added. “It's only now that I realize how fortunate I was with that, because that could have gone many, many, many different ways.”

“Because Jason had experience, he had done a bunch of stuff before coming on to this. He was like, ‘Sweetie, this is how it's meant to be, and this is how it's not meant to be, and I'm going to make sure that's the way it goes.’ He was so kind and considerate and cared about me as a human being.”

The Me Before You actress also revealed on The Graham Norton Show that Momoa replaced his traditional modesty covering with a “fluffy, pink sock” with animal prints to lighten the mood on set before their first intimate scene, in which Drogo violates Daenerys on their wedding night.

In 2024, James McAvoy admitted to hurting himself pretty badly while filming an improvised “o**y” scene for Jamie Adams’ thriller, Pose, previously titled Turn Up the Sun!

“The second last day of filming ended with about nine of us doing an o**y scene — an improvised f***ing o**y scene,” McAvoy said on the Restless Natives podcast. 

“It was h**dcore dancing, everybody was on dr**s, we had all drunk loads of whisky, and there was loads of kissing, gr**ing and disrobing.”

“There’s this amazing Spanish actor called Almudena Amor, and we had to go at it with each other,” he continued. 

“We had to be funny with it, but go for it properly, and we were both in the same headspace. So, we get to this improvised o**y, and she’s bigger than me. She’s like 5ft 11in.”

“At one point, I was holding her upside down, and we were doing some weird thing, and somebody grabbed me on the back of the neck to start biting my neck.”

This caused the Split actor to lose his balance and take a major tumble. 

“I just decked it and smashed my knee real hard on the ground,” he said. “I think that’s the only time I’ve been injured making a film.”

Oscar, Golden Globe, and Emmy-winner Allison Janney, a veteran of the screen and stage, had a first-time intimate scene experience at 49 that was scary and hilarious in equal measure. 

Janney plays Trish Maplewood in Todd Solondz’s 2009 dark comedy drama, Life During Wartime, in which she filmed a love scene with Michael Lerner’s Harvey Wiener. 

“He had to push me up against a wall, and they wanted us to look sweaty for the shot, like we’ve been at it for a while. So, they sprayed this glistening stuff all over us,” Janney shared with Entertainment Weekly in 2015. 

“They didn’t realize that we’re on a marble floor. So he pushes me up against the wall, and all of a sudden, we drop out of frame because he slips and he drags me down with him. He falls on his knees, and I can’t stop laughing.”

“Todd was trying to get me to stop because I think Michael was really hurt,” she continued. “And I couldn’t. And the cameraman couldn’t stop either.”

The incident “had the set laughing for almost an hour,” Janney revealed in an interview with People magazine. “We almost couldn’t go back to work.”

Lerner ended up having to go to the hospital for his injuries, but it remained one of the most memorable moments of Janney’s career.

“It was terrible, but it was one of those moments I'll never forget,” she said. “It was absolutely just tragically wrong and funny.”

A few years after Life During Wartime, Janney featured in her Emmy-winning role of Margaret Scully on Masters of Sex, in which she shared an intimate scene with Teddy Sears. 

“I had to ask for just a little shot of courage before I had my first s** scene with Teddy Sears, who is just the most gorgeous, wonderful, handsome specimen,” she said on the Fresh Air show by Terry Gross. 

“When I say courage, just a little bourbon ... I just wanted something to take the edge off because I was beyond nervous. Who gets to do a s** scene when you're 50?”

“The worst part is, I think, doing the run-through for the crew when they come in,” Janney explained, adding that the show kept the set “very private” out of respect for the actors.

“You go through [the motions] with the director, and then they invite the crew in because they have to see it in order to boom it and light it — and that's the part that just feels so weird.”

Dave Franco faced a unique predicament ahead of filming an explicit scene for 2014’s Seth Rogen-starrer comedy drama, Neighbors. 

In the film, Franco’s party-loving frat boy character, Pete, shares the bed with Halston Sage’s Brooke, and it was the first time the Now You See Me actor bared his backside for the camera. 

“It was my first real s** scene where I show my b**t,” Franco said on Chelsea Lately in 2014. 

The crowd cheered in support, but Franco quickly cut in with a rebuttal: “You're not going to have that reaction when you see it on the big screen. It was nerve-wracking.”

“I was pretty nervous,” he continued. “I met [Sage] the day before, and she was beautiful and very sweet, but it’s awkward. You meet each other, and then you're grinding. You don't even know her name… barely.”

“You have 20 crew members who are also watching you do it.”

To add to the already difficult situation, Franco woke up the morning they were to film the scene with a “giant pimple” on his backside. 

“I had to go to the makeup artist, who I had also met that week, and ask, ‘Can we go into the other room and you’ll put makeup — literally — on my a**?’”

Moreover, Franco and Sage’s scene was interrupted in the movie by Jerrod Carmichael’s character, Garfield. 

“He has this view of me that no one should have,” Franco joked. “He essentially had a staring contest with my brown eye and lost.”

He spoke more about it during a CONAN appearance, saying he was “nervous” while filming it. On top of that, the director, Nicholas Stoller, had very specific instructions for him.

At one point, Stoller interrupted the scene and told Franco, “Maybe just more jack rabbit?”

“So not only do you see my flat pale a** but you see it moving as fast as humanly possible,” Franco said.
 
“The one other note that he gave me was actually to flex [biceps] while doing it, but he didn’t leave it in because it looked like I was going to hit the girl.”