It may not strike you that love scenes have figured heavily in my curriculum vitae, but you would be wrong. I have tumbled with the best of them — and it has not always been easy.
Partly, I suppose, the problem in my case has been to imitate heterosexuality convincingly. Am I getting it quite right? Is this what heterosexuals get up to in bed? But in truth, it’s always tricky, whatever your orientation.
Despite the massive growth in recent years of touchy-feeliness and kisses on all cheeks for the slightest acquaintance — and notwithstanding the supposed shamelessness of actors — extreme bodily intimacy remains a delicate issue.
It is not a problem addressed by drama schools; as far as I am aware, there are no courses in Advanced Osculation, or Girl-on-Boy Body Surfing. When I was a student at the Drama Centre in 1970, emotional nakedness was the order of the day, even if, in the world outside, getting your kit off was more or less de rigueur, from Hair and Oh! Calcutta! to the Living Theatre’s Frankenstein.
But that was epic nudity; nudity as the exemplification of innocence and vulnerability. Love scenes are a different matter altogether. There you are, face to face, in all your unadorned physicality, with neither drink, nor drug, nor meal, nor relaxing social ambience to blur things. The feeling is more morning-after than night-before.
I had a scene in Shakespeare in Love that was particularly unlovely in that way. The character I played, Sir Edmund Tilney, is having a quickie when he is interrupted. It’s a brief scene, but it needed to be urgent, animal, groiny. The schedule was behind. It looked like we weren’t going to get to it, then suddenly it had to happen now!
I was introduced to the actress; there was a brief discussion about how much would be exposed (my bum, her breasts) and how long it should last (30 seconds). The furniture was quickly adjusted and, like a couple of mating dogs, we leapt on each other, our orgasm hailed by the director shouting: ”Cut!”
Great satisfaction all round, hands shaken, off we went. A typical one-night stand, in other words.
Passionate scenes like this do at least have their own momentum. Romantic encounters are a different matter. It needs a special kind of trust to express physical tenderness with a stranger. Thirty years ago I was in a BBC production of La Ronde, Schnitzler’s play in which each character has sex with someone, then moves on to another person, who in turn moves on to someone else. So all the actors have two sex scenes. Mine were with the young Amanda Redman and that remarkable actress Dorothy Tutin, then nearly 60.
I was naturally very relaxed about Amanda and very anxious about Dottie. But, in the event, it was Dottie who hurled herself at me with thrilling rapacity, whereas Amanda was rather shy. These differences are clearly visible in the finished product. Not that Amanda looks at all reserved, but it’s technique. With Dottie, it was feeling.
Then there was the play I did, very early in my career, for Gay SweatShop. It was a two-hander: a simple, romantic — but in those days, radical — tale of two young men who fall in love with each other, then drift apart. Inevitably, perhaps, a rather torrid off-stage romance developed. In the central scene we were in bed together, naked. Then we had to get out of bed. Concealing the very obvious pleasure we took in each other’s proximity led to some rather baffling improvised choreography, involving cushions and hats.
Well, we were young. Nowadays, the problem is much more one of engendering arousal rather than of suppressing it. You’re doing this in front of other people, remember (director, camera crew, props, make-up, continuity) and sometimes millions of other people. It will be up there for all time, to be watched dozens, even hundreds of times, on DVD. For some, that might in itself be a turn-on. But, like everything else in film and, one is tempted to say, in life it boils down to technique. It’s astonishing what can be done with smoke, mirrors and a little smart editing. — Guardian News & Media 2009