When it comes to getting naked in front of a camera, Hollywood stars have all kinds of stories. Whether they’re working through a choreographed sex scene or just hanging out in the nude, most of your favorite actors have bared it all at one point or another and created some of the most iconic moments in film history. To be clear, we are never, ever advocating for stars to be pressured into nudity they’re uncomfortable with, or for movies to rely on objectifying women’s bodies in lieu of, say, giving them lines.
Related story These Actors Have All Spoken Out About Being Pressured to Get Naked for a RoleHollywood has gotten much wiser in handling those sensitive scenes, so there are now intimacy coordinators, who ensure the well-being of the actors on set. With everyone involved on the same page, nudity can do so much for a movie — and we love hearing what the stars who have gotten totally naked for their roles have to say about the process.
Related story These Actors Have All Spoken Out About Being Pressured to Get Naked for a Role
While many actors share the experience of getting naked on camera, their memories and feelings about the scene completely differ. After all, Jason Segel’s hilarious full-frontal nudity in Forgetting Sarah Marshall was a very different challenge from Michael Fassbender’s intense role in Shame as struggling sex addict Brandon.
Some nude scene newcomers, such as Barry Keoghan in Saltburn, have managed to stir up major chatter while other nude scenes are so subtle they almost slipped under the radar!
There are actors rarely do nude scenes — can you name the one film Matt Damon took his clothes off? While others, like Daniel Radcliffe, put a pause on baring it all because they felt like they were doing it too often.
And female nudity on camera has changed even more drastically, with many women now reclaiming their right to show their bodies from a long tradition of being objectified and exploited by men.
Jennifer Lawrence spoke out about the decision to go fully naked in 2018’s Red Sparrow after her personal nude photos were leaked four years prior, saying she cherished the opportunity to present her naked body on her own terms.
“I feel like something that was taken from me, I got back,” Lawrence said on 60 Minutes. “It’s my body, it’s my art, and it’s my choice. And if you don’t like boobs, you should not go see ‘Red Sparrow.'”
Read on for a list of every star who got totally naked on camera.
This story was originally published in July 2020
Barry Keoghan
Barry Keoghan’s role in Saltburn has caused quite the stir and with so many weirdly wonderful scenes — yes, we’re referring to the graveyard scene — Keoghan’s nude dance sequence almost flew under the radar!
Keoghan told Entertainment Weekly that he was initially nervous about the scene but didn’t take long to get comfortable.
“The initial thing was about me having no clothes on. I’m a bit, ehhh. But after take one, I was ready to go. I was like, Let’s go again. Let’s go again,’” he explained.
“You kind of forget because there’s such a comfortable environment created, and it gives you that license to go, ‘All right, this is about the story now.”
Emma Stone
Emma Stone‘s first ever nude scene was in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favorite and she clearly felt so comfortable on the director’s set that she did it again in his 2023 movie Poor Things.
Glen Powell
Glen Powell stripped down in 2023 rom-com Anyone But You and almost caused himself a serious injury while filming the cliffside scene!
“Taking your clothes off on the side of a cliff in a hurry is not safe either,” Powell told Variety. “Nobody talks about that safety issue on set, where I almost died falling off a cliff taking my pants off too fast. But it’s a really fun scene, so it was all worth it.”
Jennifer Lawrence
Jennifer Lawrence appeared in a hilarious full-frontal nude scene in No Hard Feelings, an X-rated comedy on Netflix but it wasn’t her first time getting naked on camera.
Lawrence has publicly reflected on why it felt empowering to go nude in Red Sparrow after swearing she never would — but she also told pal Ellen DeGeneres that she had specific concerns about the on-set temperature.
“What are you doing with this heat!” She told the crew. “My nipples are going to be huge!”
Jennifer Aniston
Jennifer Aniston bared it all in a daring sex scene with Jon Hamm in The Morning Show on Apple TV+.
The co-stars acted out an intimate scene after an intense interview. In the sequence, the Friends star, 54, is seen laying naked on Hamm’s back and she looks good while doing it.
Jon Hamm
Jon Hamm, 52, also stripped down for his scene with Aniston. The former Mad Men star joined the hit show this season playing tech billionaire Paul Marks who serves as a love interest to Aniston’s character, Alex Levy.
Cillian Murphy
Cillian Murphy got completely naked for three nude scenes in Oppenheimer, in which he plays the titular role.
Murphy’s character is seen having several intimate moments with Jean Tatlock, a psychiatrist who Robert Oppenheimer had an affair with. Tatlock is played by Florence Pugh.
The first of the sex scenes stirred quite a controversy among Hindu viewers who found the appearance of their holy text in the scene offensive.
Florence Pugh
In addition to appearing completely nude in Oppenheimer, Pugh also stripped down for Outlaw King in 2018. However, all anyone could talk about was Chris Pine’s full-frontal scene in the movie, a reaction he took issue with.
“Florence shows her breasts and her body and no one’s talking about it,” Pine told The Guardian in 2018. “Is that because she’s expected to do that as a woman, and I, as a man, am not? And why am I not expected to do that? Because it shows vulnerability or a weakness? I just don’t know.”
Cynthia Nixon
During the premiere of the second season of And Just Like That…, Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda shared a racy sex scene with their love interest Che Diaz (Sara Ramírez). “I feel like I was always fairly game for it,” Nixon told Entertainment Tonight of going fully nude for it. “It’s just one of the main subjects of the show is sex — people having sex and people having great sex and people having terrible sex and people having hilarious sex.”
“Miranda is a total control freak, so she’s tried to maybe kind of — for the first time really — let go,” Nixon said of her character.
Kristen Wiig
Kristen Wiig opened up about getting naked in Welcome to Me, telling MTV News, “After I did it the first time, I was like, well, that’s oddly freeing, to be totally naked in front of a bunch of people that you don’t know. It’s scary but it’s something I can say I did.”
Charlize Theron
In the 1997 movie, The Devil’s Advocate, Charlize Theron filmed a nude scene in a church.
Natalie Portman
Natalie Portman agreed to a nude scene in Wes Anderson’s Hotel Chevalier, but she’s refused to get totally undressed on screen since. “It’s not that I regret the actual thing,” she told The Guardian in 2007, continuing, “But it really depresses me that what I think is a wonderful film, that I’m really happy with – and Wes put a lot of time and energy into planning shots and writing the script, it’s very minimal, very exact – and then at the end literally half of any article or review about it has been about the nudity.”
Kristen Dunst
Kristen Dunst bared it all for her role in Melancholia, and in 2012, she told ABC News, “What we made as a film means more to me than the fact that, you know, I’m on the Internet naked. It looks beautiful, it was shot well. It’s a beautiful film. It is not something I feel embarrassed about.”
Jessica Lange
Jessica Lange got nude for a scene in the film Frances, which was shot in 1982.
Viggo Mortensen
As they care-free hippie dad in Captain Fantastic, Viggo Mortensen went full frontal. “Viggo was so immersed in the role and didn’t balk at all,” said movie producer Shivani Rawat to ShowBiz411. “He’s a character actor. He gets it.”
Denise Richards
In 1998’s Wild Things, Denise Richards went fully nude in a threesome scene alongside fellow actress Neve Campbell. Many years later, in an episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Richards opened up about the movie.
“When it was just her [Campbell] and I, it was easier because you just feel like you’ll protect each other and you know different things you don’t want, that kind of thing,” Richards said, per Decider. “But the other part of it that wasn’t easier with that scene was knowing that people on the crew were, ‘Oh, two girls are kissing.'”
Richards also remembered her mom’s support in all of it. “My mom was actually the one that said, ‘If you feel this is something you want to do for your career then you just do it,'” she recalled.
Chris Pine
Chris Pine wasn’t afraid to commit to role in the 2018 film Outlaw King. According to Vulture, “Pine emerges from the water fully nude, before quickly putting on his whatever-the-medieval-word-for-underwear-is.” Though the scene is short, it didn’t stop everyone from talking about it when the movie came out.
“People were giggling about my penis as if they were schoolschildren,” Pine told The Guardian. “I think it’s maybe the dying embers of this Calvinistic idea that self-flagellating and shame and anger and violence is all good and yet sex and intimacy, making love is bad. And that manifests in us all giggling about a penis – it’s so stupid.”
Léa Seydoux
Léa Seydoux bared it all in 2013 lesbian romance film Blue Is the Warmest Color. “I wanted to go far in a character,” the actress told Metro about her role in the movie. “I wanted to, like, explore and expose myself. And even the sex scenes… I wanted to experience how it would be to shoot things like that.”
Mark Ruffalo
Mark Ruffalo wore his birthday suit while filming a sex scene alongside Meg Ryan in 2003’s In the Cut. Talking to Entertainment Weekly, Ruffalo also opened up about filming the scenes. Director Jane Campion ”wanted the character to be such a competent and confident lover that she kept shouting things like, ‘You’re not at school anymore. You know what you’re doing,'” Ruffalo recalled. “It was very stressful.”
Salma Hayek
Salma Hayek bared it all on screen for Frida, but not out of her own personal desire to be filmed nude. In an op-ed she wrote for The New York Times about Harvey Weinstein, who produced the film, Hayek shared that Weinstein was going to kick her off the set unless “I agreed to do a sex scene with another woman. And he demanded full-frontal nudity.”
She heartbreakingly recalled the day she had to film the scene, writing, “For the first and last time in my career, I had a nervous breakdown: My body began to shake uncontrollably, my breath was short and I began to cry and cry, unable to stop, as if I were throwing up tears… It was not because I would be naked with another woman. It was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein.”
Lena Headey
While Lena Headey opted for a body double for that infamous penance walk scene in Game of Thrones, she did get nude for the movie 9 Bullets.
Emma Thompson
Emma Thompson recently made headlines for her full-frontal nude scene in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande and how honest she’s been about body image struggles. “When I’m looking in the mirror, I’m always trying to make myself look ‘better’ — turning this way or that, checking out my a**e, pulling something in. Simply revealing my utter incapacity to accept my body as it is.”
Keira Knightley
Keira Knightley has participated in quite a few nude scenes in films like The Jacket, Silk, A Dangerous Method, and The Aftermath. In an interview for the Chanel Connects podcast per Elle, she revealed she’d no longer do sex scenes for male-directed films either to end the male gaze. “I don’t want it to be those horrible sex scenes where you’re all greased up and everybody is grunting. I’m not interested in doing that,” she added. “I feel very uncomfortable now trying to portray the male gaze.”
Tilda Swinton
Although Tilda Swinton has gone partially nude for many of her roles, the film Female Perversions is the only one where she displayed full frontal nudity.
Diane Keaton
Diane Keaton wowed audiences when she did a full frontal nude scene at 57 years old for the hit 2003 film Something’s Gotta Give. And she’s continued to do them since, telling Daily Mail, “Who says you can’t do a bedroom scene in your 70s?”
Monica Bellucci
Monica Bellucci has done nudity in films like Irreversible, Malena, and That Summer. In an interview with TODAY, she said her nude scene in That Summer “was an act of generosity,” and she only does those scenes with directors that make her feel protected.
Rae Dawn Chong
Who could forget when Rae Dawn Chong went fully nude in the fan-favorite fantasy film Quest for Fire?
Natalie Dormer
If you saw The Tudors, you saw Natalie Dormer nude a couple times when she played Anne Boleyn. However, she doesn’t love doing those kinds of scenes. “To set the record straight, I have never been comfortable doing sex or nude scenes,” she said to New Statesman. “I’ve turned down roles this year that have involved sex, solely because of the way I’ve been misrepresented. I’m so terrified at the moment of perpetuating that clickbait image of me.”
Sally Hawkins
Sally Hawkins wowed audiences with her role in the Oscar-winning film Shape of Water.
Julianne Moore
Julianne Moore always goes for the bold choice in her films, especially when she did a nudity scene in the thriller Chloe alongside Amanda Seyfried and again in Gloria Bell. But she said in an interview with People that sex on screen is not realistic, saying, “People never have sex the way they do in the movies. You see that in these old sexy movies where somebody rips somebody’s blouse off. I’d be so upset if someone tore the buttons off my shirt,” she joked. “I’d be ‘What are you doing?’”
Rachel Weisz
Rachel Weisz has also done a few tasteful nude scenes in films like Stealing Beauty and I Want You. When asked if she used a body double, in an archived interview Hello, she responded, “Absolutely not. It was all me. I never even thought of using a double.”
Jennifer Connelly
Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Connelly has gotten nude a few times for the camera, including in films like American Pastoral, Shelter, and Requiem for a Dream.
Sydney Sweeney
Sydney Sweeney has had a meteoric rise in recent years with her starring roles in Euphoria, White Lotus, and the movie The Voyeurs. In the latter, she engaged in a very steamy, full-frontal sex scene. She said to Hollywood Reporter, “People forget that I’m playing a character, they think, ‘Oh, she gets naked onscreen, she’s a sex symbol. And I can’t get past that. I have no problems with those scenes, and I won’t stop doing them, but I wish there was an easier way to have an open conversation about what we’re assuming about actors in the industry.”
Kelly Preston
Before Kelly Preston passed away in 2020, she did a slew of amazing and fun pictures, including the 1985 film Mischief, where she decided to go fully nude.
Alexandra Daddario
Alexandra Daddario has been in a plethora of notable shows like The White Lotus and True Detective. Speaking of True Detective, she ended up doing a memorable strip tease and nude scene for it, and it was the talk of the town. At one point, she found out former President Obama watched the show, to which she tweeted, “…. The president has seen my boobs.”
Juno Temple
You may or may not remember when Juno Temple went fully nude in the indie film Killer Joe, Horns, alongside Matthew McConaughey. But she’s been nude in quite a few projects like Ted Lasso, Vinyl, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, and Magic Magic, to name a few.
Elizabeth Berkley
After going fully nude in the later cult classic Showgirls, Elizabeth Berkley said the role changed her, and made her feel like a pariah in Hollywood. “It changed me. It was a life moment, and I cannot help but say I would be a different person had I not gone through the depths of what it taught me,” she said to People in 2020. “No one associated with the film spoke up on my behalf to protect me. I was left out in the cold and I was a pariah in the industry I had worked so hard for.”
Bradley Cooper
Bradley Cooper got very candid about going fully nude during one scene for his role in the 2021 film Nightmare Alley. “I can still remember that day, just to be naked in front of the crew for six hours, and it was Toni Collette’s first day,” the actor told KCRW’s The Business. “It was just like, ‘Whoa.’ It was pretty heavy.”
Cooper also shared his approach toward the film and philosophy, as well. “The content of what the movie is, what we were exploring, in order to do it in a real way, it demanded that we’d be naked emotionally and soulfully.”
Oscar Isaac
During his October 15, 2021, appearance on The View, Oscar Isaac chatted about the nudity scene he did for HBO’s take on Scenes From A Marriage. “I was surprised because I didn’t know that was going to happen,” the actor told the co-hosts.
“You get sent the stuff to look at and be like, ‘Okay, I’m fine with that.’ I saw it on a laptop quite dark, and I didn’t notice what was happening down there. There was a surprise when I started seeing these things of like, ‘It’s full frontal.’ I’m like, no! What are you talking about? Then I saw, clear as day on the big TV there. It’s there for everyone.”
Jessica Chastain
Isaac’s co-star, Jessica Chastain, also chimed in to say that she wanted the nudity on the show to be equal. “Well, I said to Hagai, who wrote and directed in the series, I said in the very beginning, ‘I’m comfortable with all the nudity, but any part of my body that you show, you’re going to have to show the same with Oscar,’” Chastain shared on The View. “There’s a shower scene we have in Episode 2, and you see my body, so you see his body. For me, I wanted it to be balanced.”
Elizabeth Olsen
Elizabeth Olsen has been gracing our screens as Wanda Maximoff/The Scarlet Witch on WandaVision lately, but many people forget the indie film where she got her start: Martha Marcy May Marlene.
The subject matter was challenging because her character was under the spell of a charismatic cult leader — and many of her scenes involved sexual abuse under his power. Yet Olsen felt her nudity was crucial to her character’s story.
“I feel like actors are tools to help the story, and if [nudity is] part of the story in an effective way, then it just is. If it’s sensationalized and gratuitous, I don’t want to do it,” she explained to Vulture. “In this film, it has a very clear purpose of someone losing their full sense of self-identity and ownership of herself and her body and her mind.”
Matt Damon
Matt Damon is usually one of Hollywood’s more conservative actors when it comes to nudity, but there is one where he decided to bare all. He felt like it made sense in telling the story of Liberace and his lover, Scott Thorson, in Behind the Candelabra.
“Normally I’d say no to nudity, but I just did a lot of it playing the long-term partner of Liberace, Scott Thorson, in Behind the Candelabra, he explained to Playboy. “I mean, it’s tastefully done. Steven Soderbergh directed it, and Michael Douglas plays Liberace. But this movie’s not going to be for everyone.”
We like Damon’s walk on the wild side, he should do it more often.
Leonardo DiCaprio
Leonardo DiCaprio’s Wolf of Wall Street antics included lots of drug-sniffing, drink-chugging, and yes, full-frontal nudity. And the Departed star didn’t shy away from clarifying that he did not, in fact, use a body double, telling Extra: “It was all me, pal. All the flopping around, it was all me.”
“Look, when you do a character like this, you have to go all out,” he added. “You can’t pull any punches. You have to swing for the fences. You just gotta do it. You can’t think about yourself because it’s not me. It’s a depiction of somebody else…Hopefully people enjoy it.”
Eva Green
Eva Green’s nudity in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For may have caused the biggest stir, but an early Bertolucci film The Dreamers was her first introduction to the art of baring it all for the camera.
“I am a very shy person in life, very reserved, but you know, it’s Bernardo Bertolucci. I’ve seen [Last Tango in Paris] and it’s not pornographic, it’s not vulgar, it’s not sick, so I trusted him,” she said in 2004. “He’s a master of love and eroticism, but it’s good because I stopped being self-conscious. I felt like I was on drugs or anesthetized, because you have to be. You have to let yourself slip away and forget everything, forget the sound guy and all that.”
Penélope Cruz
With 1992 film Jamón, Jamón, Penélope Cruz both met future husband Javier Bardem and burst onto the scene as a movie star — and it involved stripping down for some key scenes.
“I thought, ‘There is a character there, there is a style, the material is really good.’ Of course I was not looking forward to those scenes but I did it,” she told Esquire of the film’s more graphic scenes. “Everyone was really respectful, aware of the fact that I was 18. I remember the last day of filming, I was crying, saying, ‘What if I never shoot a movie again?’ The feeling was devastating. ‘Who knows when I will see these people again?’ Including Javier.”
Afterwards, she explains that she “went away for a while from anything that had to do with nudity or sex scenes” for a while” “I felt that I needed at that point to stay away from that. Not as a calculated plan. Personally, I needed that.”
Colin Farrell
Colin Farrell’s first time attempting a full-frontal nude scene in Tigerland ended in a bit of a disaster, he later admitted on Ellen.
“I went up to the director Joel Schumacher and I had on a dressing gown and nothing underneath,” he recounts. “And I was obviously so nervous that I lost my mind for a second cause I opened my dressing gown and I said, ‘It’s a bit, is it a bit…’ Cause I had, like most men, what you could refer to as ‘retro bush.'”
It gets worse: “I went into my trailer and I got a bin and I put it there. And I sat over the bin and I got the beard trimmer — I was nervous — and I trimmed the right side a little bit and obviously had to match it, so I trimmed the left but I overshot the mark a little bit. So I had to go back in and trim the right again, and I overshot that.”
Let’s hope Farrell’s gotten in touch with some slightly more sophisticated grooming techniques since.
Scarlett Johansson
When Scarlett Johansson went naked for Under The Skin, it was important for her to feel like the script required it: “The nudity is written in to the script and I hope the audience agrees that it’s, you know, it’s not really indulging,” she said. “It’s almost like biological in a weird way, I think, and there is a lot of intention behind it,” she said in an interview with MTV, via Cosmopolitan.
Halle Berry
Halle Berry’s full-frontal nudity came in the form of a 2001 Monster Ball sex scene with Billy Bob Thornton.
“We both agreed to be uninhibited with our bodies, so it wasn’t just the woman who was being exposed, and we just said, ‘Let’s service these characters,’” she told The Guardian.
“We only had to do it one time, which is good, because you don’t really want to have to go there that many times.”
Ben Affleck
Ben Affleck’s nude turn in Gone Girl felt important for the actor to capture the seriousness of the role. “This is a warts and all movie. It can have no vanity. You have to see the naked underbelly of this character,” he told MTV News.
Angelina Jolie
While Angelina Jolie’s most famous naked scenes come from 1998 biopic Gia, she’s spoken most openly about the topless sex scene she shot with then-husband Brad Pitt for By The Sea.
“Love scenes are strange anyway, but when you’re doing a love scene with a person that you really have sex with? The only way to get through it was for us to all talk about the absurdity of it and make sure no one was feeling awkward,” she told Entertainment Tonight.
Nicole Kidman
Nicole Kidman and then-husband Tom Cruise took part in some of the most famous sex scenes of all time in Eyes Wide Shut — but Kidman says their on-screen drama had almost nothing to do with their real relationship.
“Onscreen, the husband and wife are at odds, and [director Stanley Kubrick] wanted to use our marriage as a supposed reality. That was Stanley: He used the movie as provocation, pretending it was our sex life,” Kidman told The Hollywood Reporter. “But obviously it wasn’t us.”
Michael Fassbender
Michael Fassbender famously bared it all for Shame but says the sheer pace of the shoot made it hard to dwell on feeling awkward.
“We moved very fast,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “We shot it in 25 days, so I kind of had to get over it and get on with it.”
Carey Mulligan
Everyone remembers Michael Fassbender’s nude scene in Shame, but his co-star Carey Mulligan also bared all in a shower scene. The actress isn’t normally one to gravitate toward nudity, but we feel her when she didn’t get the anticipated workout time ahead of shooting the scene.
“I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of nudity . . . When it came to this, it just seemed so obvious that she is the sort of person who would have no trouble being naked in front of any family member, especially not her brother,” she told PopSugar. “I thought I had a week before the nude scene to go to the gym, but we shot it on my first day of filming.”
Sarah Silverman
Sarah Silverman is no stranger to raunchy stand-up comedy, but many were shocked when she took it a step further to do a nude scene in the movie I Smile Back.
Margot Robbie
“Tons of people are watching you,” Margot Robbie told Vanity Fair.
“There isn’t an option. It’s just like, ‘This is what you need to do — get on with it.’ The sooner you do it, the sooner you can stop doing it.”
Anne Hathaway
Anne Hathaway at The National Board of Review Awards Gala held at Cipriani 42nd St on January 11, 2024 in New York, New York. (Photo by Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty Images)
Jason Segel
Jason Segel has gone full-frontal in both Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Sex Tape, and opened the doors in a big way for men to do full-frontal nudity without it seeming like the biggest deal in the world.
Also, watching him buck-naked refusing to get dressed while Kristen Bell breaks up with him? Epic.
Cameron Diaz
Speaking of Sex Tape, Cameron Diaz had a nonchalant attitude toward her own nudity in the role: “It’s just a part of the role. So I did it. I mean, you see everything.”
Dakota Johnson
Of course, the Fifty Shades of Grey heroine has her own stories about stripping down on set — and while she knew what she was in for, some scenes weren’t exactly a piece of cake.
“Ana’s chained to a drop-down gate that is in the red room and blindfolded, and she’s handcuffed by her wrists and feet,” she told Elle.
“That was difficult because no matter how much you know that the environment is not real and how much you are protected and safe and can work at your own speed, your senses are deprived.”
Ewan McGregor
Ewan McGregor has treated us to a look at his naked body more than once, cheekily joking early in his career that it was his feminist way of evening the score.
“Women are always expected to be naked in films, but I like to try and do it so they are not naked — have the women not be naked,” he told Craig Ferguson after appearing nude in Fargo.“It’s a feminist thing that I do.”
Kate Winslet
Kate Winslet bared it all in 2001’s Iris, but she made it clear in an interview with V Magazine that she approaches it like any other job.
“I just go in and say ‘Oh f-ck let’s do it’ and boom. If you complain about it or procrastinate it’s not going to go away. Its a profoundly bizarre thing to do. As actors you talk about it all the time. You can literally be tangled in sheets, and you turn to the other actor and say ‘What the f-ck are we doing?’ Dear Mum, at work today I had so-and-so’s left nut sack pressed against my cheek. It’s sort of unethical if you think about it in those terms.”
Emilia Clarke
Emilia Clarke was devastatingly honest about how frightening her early naked Game of Thrones scenes were on Dax Shepard’s podcast earlier this year.
“I’ve never been to a set like this, I’ve only been on a set twice before, and now I was completely naked on set, with all these people, and I did not know what to do,” she recounted “I did not know what was expected of me, I did not know what you wanted, I did not know what I wanted. Regardless of whether it was nudity or not, all-season one I felt I was not worth asking for anything, I was not worth anything at all.”
Helen Hunt
Helen Hunt leaves nothing to the imagination in The Sessions, noting that she felt a new freedom in taking on such a role now that she was out of her 20s
“To get a chance to embody a woman, particularly a woman who’s not 20 years old, and celebrate that we all have bodies and everybody has a god-given right to feel pleasure, I liked being part of bringing that to life,” the actress said.
Sacha Baron Cohen
In 2006’s Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen has a fully nude fight — and he’s since bared it all again for 2009’s Bruno. With Cohen, it’s clear that he’s been willing to push the boundaries with his naked body.
Maggie Gyllenhaal
Maggie Gyllenhaal at the 2023 Academy Museum Gala held at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on December 3, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Michael Buckner/Variety via Getty Images)
Liv Tyler
Liv Tyler strips down to her birthday suit in HBO drama The Leftovers, and co-star Chris Zylka confirms that the scene was all about what their characters needed.
“It serves such a purpose to the script that it wasn’t really nerve-wracking or anything like that,” Zylka told Decider. “It was just us being the characters and being in The Leftovers.”
Rosario Dawson
Rosario Dawson decided in the spur of the moment to go all the way naked in a sex scene with Colin Farell for Alexander.
“The sex scene that you will see is really intense and not anything I have done before,” she told the NY Post.
“We worked hard on the scene, Oliver, Colin and I, to convey the strength of their relationship. It’s comes off crazy. It’s brilliant.”
Alicia Vikander
Alicia Vikander burst onto the scene in more ways than one with sci-fi drama Ex Machina, in which we see her character fully naked. The actress later revealed to Harper’s Bazaar UK that she has a “one-take” policy for shooting that kind of scene.
“I probably did my first sex scene at 20 and it’s always been technical, as it should be; it should never be anything but technical,” she explained. “I tell the crew it’s a one-taker. That way, everybody on set is on point, because you have to get it done in one take. Like a dancer, we [choreographed it] the same way.”
Sharon Stone
Sharon Stone has since revealed that her famous scene in Basic Instinct was shot more explicitly than she’d been led to believe: “Some years ago I was sitting on a sound stage, and my director said, ‘Can you hand me your underpants because we’re seeing them in the scene and you shouldn’t have underpants on, but we won’t see anything,’” she said at the 2019 G2 Men of the Year Awards.
But of course, you could see something — and Stone was known for that crossing-uncrossing legs scene for decades.
Rooney Mara
Rooney Mara has famously gotten naked to play Lisbeth Sander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — and while plenty of things about that movie are shocking, Mara doesn’t think nudity is one
‘I certainly don’t want to be involved in anything that is gratuitous, but I don’t think the human body is something to be ashamed of,” she told Interview magazine.
“Every other person on the planet has the same parts as I do. So seeing them shouldn’t be a huge shock to most people.”
Olivia Wilde
While Olivia Wilde wasn’t too bothered by the nudity required for Third Person, there was one particular naked scene she struggled with: running down the stairs in the buff..
“Not only did I have to do it again and again and again, but this was a scene in which I was running downstairs naked,” she told David Letterman, “which no-one should ever do on camera.”
Mark Wahlberg
While Mark Wahlberg famously got naked to play an adult film star in Boogie Nights, his latest strip-down was actually at his wife’s behest.
Wahlberg offered full frontal nudity in xchange for cutting a graphic sex scene in 2011’s Broken City figuring his wife would be happier with the trade-off.
Helen Mirren
While Helen Mirren became famous earlier in her career for naked scenes in movies like Caligula, she later revealed that she “always hated doing sex scenes, every part of [her] life”
Evan Rachel Wood
Evan Rachel Wood at the Variety Studio, Presented by King’s Hawaiian – Day 1 at the St. Regis Hotel on Friday, September 9th 2022 in Toronto, Canada. (Photo by Michelle Quance/Variety via Getty Images)
Christian Bale
Christian Bale’s nudity in American Psycho pre-empted a long career of Bale expressing himself through his physical body in the extreme. That sex scene where he’s flexing in the mirror? Improvised by Bale right there on set.
Heather Graham
Heather Graham famously got naked for her role in Boogie Nights but says it took her a while to accept her own sexuality
“It’s an aspect of my personality,” she told Women’s Health. “Sex is a part of who I am and it took me a long time to feel good about it.”
Kim Cattrall
Kim Cattrall at Balmain Ready To Wear Spring 2024 held at Palais de Chaillot on September 27, 2023 in Paris, France. (Photo by Swan Gallet/WWD via Getty Images)
Carice van Houten
“I feel very strongly about the nudity,” Carice van Houten told Entertainment Weekly of her role as the Red Woman in Game of Thrones.
“I feel very strongly about how you can show machine guns, and you can show horrible things but you see a nipple and it’s, ‘Oh my God! A nipple has been displayed!’”
Richard Gere
Richard Gere at the City Harvest 40th Anniversary Gala held at Cipriani 42nd Street on April 25, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty Images)
Paul Mescal
In Hulu’s sexy romance Normal People, Paul Mescal committed 100% — and yes, that means full frontal.
Mescal hilariously remembers their director telling him about an upcoming scene to Vulture: “‘Now you know, Paul, as you’ve seen in the book, we’re requiring and asking you for a full-frontal nudity clause…’I was totally surprised by the fact that there would be any other way of doing it. If you’re going to do the book correctly, I think that’s required.”
Daisy Edgar-Jones
Mescal wasn’t the only one who revealed it all. His co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones also stripped down.
Marion Cotillard
Marion Cotillard has gone nude for a number of films, including Ismael’s Ghosts. Per the actress, her happiness with the scene is all about what it’s doing for her character.
“In Rust and Bone, we had very naked love scenes, and it was totally different, I was very happy,” she told the Wall Street Journal.
“Not because [co-star] Matthias Schoenaerts is superhot, absolutely not, because I had experience with Johnny Depp before [in 2009’s “Public Enemies”] and it was also really hard for me. I was just very happy for my character. The whole day I was naked on set and I was totally fine with it.”
Lena Dunham
Lena Dunham has shot some famously nude scenes in Girls and says the “unsexiness” is exactly what makes it easier to pull off. “I don’t have any anxiety about sex scenes, they’re just something that I do.
“I think I feel vulnerable when I have to really act like I’m in love or happy or show an emotion that’s really private,” she told Huffington Post. “It’s easy to do a sex scene when you look bored or dissatisfied or confused.”
Antonio Banderas
Antonio Banderas isn’t shy about showing off his naked body on-camera — he’s done it three times so far in False Eyelash, Baton Rouge and Law of Desire. In Law of Desire, he has a hot sex scene with actor Eusebio Poncela and Banderas caught a lot of flack for it.
“I felt very early on in my professional life that where there were limits, there shouldn’t have been limits. I remember in Law of Desire, where I played a homosexual, that people were more upset that I kissed a man on the mouth than I killed a man,” he told Page Six. “It’s a very interesting approach to morality in our days, so you see there is an incredible amount of hypocritical judgment over those things.”
Banderas isn’t interested in your opinion about sex and nudity in film, he’s going to pick and choose roles that suit his career.
Reese Witherspoon
In 2014’s Wild, Reese Witherspoon was all in for the role, even if it meant doing scenes she wasn’t totally comfortable with. “It was really hard to do it,” she said in a Q&A per Us Weekly. “I didn’t want to do any of it. I really didn’t want to do the sex scenes. No sex scenes are fun.”
To get some much-needed inspiration, she called Cheryl Strayed, who wrote the memoir the movie was based on. “I called Cheryl the day before and I was like, ‘I have to do this scene in this alley and I’m having sex with two guys and I’m like, ‘Why did you do this?!’” Strayed then funnily responded, “I’m sorry I was such a slut in the ’90s.” We love this honest friendship!
Daniel Radcliffe
Daniel Radcliffe has gotten naked for three films — Horns, The F Word and Kill Your Darlings — and the Broadway stage in Equus, so hanging out in the buff is not one of his hang-ups. He finally had to slow down taking off his clothes on-camera because he was worried too much of him was being seen on-screen.
“I got naked in three films last year, please can I not?,” He joked to The Independent about producers of his series, A Young Doctor’s Notebook, contemplating a nude scene. “At some point, everyone’s going to start assuming I’m an exhibitionist.”
Hey, it’s good to be comfortable in your own skin
Harvey Keitel
Harvey Keitel is well-known for his nude scenes in The Bad Lieutenant and The Piano, but don’t you dare ask him about it. You’re going to get an answer you probably didn’t expect.
“I never do naked scenes,” Keitel told The Washington Post. “An actor does not do nude scenes. I told a story, and it’s my obligation to tell that story as honestly and as deeply as my ability will allow me.”
OK, so he’s saying that taking off his clothes in both films helped move the story along. We can buy that, but it’s the follow-up that has us a bit confused.
“I’m not going to discuss nudity in films,” he continued. “People should not be nude in films. People should tell stories that mean something to them.”
OK, Harvey, you do you!
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