We always talk about the adult industry here. Okay, so maybe not always at a good 90 to 95 percent of the time. Now, how about we talk about movies. Not exactly mainstream one but movies in general. You know, art films, independent releases, etc. Yeah, those films. Films with uhm sex scenes. Hey, we can’t steer away from our site’s very essence now, can we?
But these aren’t just sex scenes. What we’re going to talk about now is real sex in movies. Sex that really happened and not just acting it out. Real as to give the scenes justice.
So without further ado, my friends, here are the hot scenes where the stars had real sex on screen.
1. The film Blue Movie, directed by Andy Warhol and released in 1969, was the first to feature real sex in the United States.
Today, Warhol is most known as the revolutionary pop artist responsible for iconic silk-screened images of Campbell’s Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, but he was also a prolific filmmaker. His films, on the other hand, rarely resembled what most people believe a film to look like. For example, his five-and-a-half-hour video Sleep was entirely composed of footage of his lover sleeping.
The plot of the 133-minute Blue Movie was a little more complicated, but still very straightforward: a couple (Viva and Louis Walden) hang out in their New York apartment. They talk about the Vietnam War, cook, shower, and then engage in unsimulated sex.
The film had a strong launch in New York theaters and was also exhibited in Berkeley, California. However, it wasn’t all roses: a theater in New York City that screened it was fined $250 for obscenity.
2. Bob Guccione, the publisher of the adult magazine Penthouse, only made one film: 1979’s historical epic Caligula, which had renowned actors like Peter O’Toole and Helen Mirren… and a lot of hardcore, unsimulated sex.
Guccione sneaked back onto the set with a team of Penthouse pets and filmed a series of orgiastic sequences including real, unsimulated sex, and added them into the finished picture after production wrapped and director Tinto Brass and his celebrated cast went home.
The released picture, now about three hours long, performed well in Italian theaters before being impounded by authorities for being obscene. In the United States, the picture grossed $23 million, making it the highest-grossing independent film ever at the time, yet it was subjected to numerous obscenity cases.
3. The Guardian rated Michael Winterbottom’s 2004 film 9 Songs “the most sexually explicit mainstream British film to date,” citing a foot job as one of its highlights.
Margo Stilley and Kieran O’Brien, the film’s leads, do practically everything in the film. They masturbate with and without a vibrator, perform fellatio, and O’Brien even ejaculates onscreen in addition to the foot job.
But, in the end, neither critics nor spectators were impressed by the sexual fireworks. On Rotten Tomatoes, critics agree that “the unerotic sex scenes quickly become monotonous to watch, and the lovers lack the charm required to make viewers care about them.”
4. In the climax of the 2003 film Brown Bunny, Chlo Sevigny had oral sex with co-star Vincent Gallo.
The film is about a motorcycle racer (Gallo) who is haunted by tragic memories of a former girlfriend (Sevigny), but it is best known for that moment and its response at the Cannes Film Festival (more on that later).
Gallo, who also wrote and directed the film, told Film Freak Central that he pitched the project to Sevigny (with whom he’d had a previous relationship) by saying, “Remember that night in Paris when I did that thing to you but you didn’t do it to me because you weren’t so into it? Well, you might have to do that. On film.” He went on to say that the scene was needed, in his opinion, to demonstrate the connection between male sexuality and self-loathing.
It was unexpected that Sevigny consented to be in a sure-to-be-notorious scene, given that she was a well-known, Academy Award-nominated actress, but she stuck by her decision over a decade later.
“I’d probably do it today. I believe in Vincent as an artist, and I stand behind the film,” she said in 2016, adding, “It was a rebellious gesture… It was a gamble.”
Unfortunately, the risk did not pay off: the film’s premiere screening at the Cannes Film Festival was met with a chorus of boos, with noted picture critic Roger Ebert labeling it the worst film ever exhibited at the festival.
5. When asked to imitate masturbation in the 2008 film Little Ashes, Robert Pattinson felt his efforts weren’t genuine enough, so he did the act on camera.
Masturbating on the set of a big motion picture may sound odd, but Pattinson was playing surrealist painter Salvador Dal.
Pattinson revealed in a 2013 interview with Germany’s Interview magazine that his genuine orgasm expression is caught in the film. When asked why he didn’t just pretend, Pattinson answered, “Try it. I can tell you right now, no chance. It just doesn’t work.” He went on to claim that he was scared the scene would ruin his career, but he received the phone telling him he’d been cast in Twilight shortly after production concluded.
Fortunately, Pattinson’s acting skills appear to have improved since his early career. Since then, he has successfully portrayed masturbation in four films: High Life, Damsel, The Devil All the Time, and The Lighthouse.
6. Love, a 2015 film, became a Netflix sensation because TikTokers made watching the film’s explicit opening scene, which featured unsimulated sex, into a TikTok challenge.
When Gaspar Noé’s film about a young couple whose relationship takes a turn when they welcome a third person into their bed was released, it didn’t make a big impression. However, five years later, it made Netflix’s Top 10 after the TikTok challenge, in which people videotaped themselves watching the opening sequence without knowing anything about the film, went viral (Sorry, Love is no longer available on Netflix, but the film begins with the pair naked in bed, pleading with each other to climax with their hands; it’s no Indiana Jones entering a Peruvian temple to recover a golden idol, but it’s still a helluva way to open a film!).
Despite all of the unsimulated sex, Noé told Esquire that the performers did not prepare by having practice sex. “They kissed for the first time on the first day of filming, and most parts in the film are real, but others are faked; we don’t want to emphasize what is what.”
7. Shia LaBeouf, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgrd, and Uma Thurman all appear in unsimulated sex scenes in Lars von Trier’s 2013 film Nymphomaniac… but not in the way you might expect.
Prior to the film’s release, producer Louise Vesth told the Hollywood Reporter that the producers had the stars mimic their sex scenes, then brought in body doubles to film the same-sex sequences unsimulated. Later, in postproduction, they combined the two using digital effects. “So the star will be above the waist, and the doubles will be below the waist,” Vesth explained.
8. Shortbus, a 2006 film directed by John Cameron Mitchell, has a lot of unsimulated sex, so much so that Mitchell performed fellatio in the film as a sign of solidarity with his performers.
Mitchell’s film, about a varied group of young people seeking to find their place in New York (he was the co-creator and original star of Hedwig and the Angry Inch), was about a diverse group of young people attempting to find their place in New York. “I wanted to work with real sex as part of the story, as it is in our lives — we don’t cut away the first time we have sex with someone we are in love with,” Mitchell told Medium. “So Shortbus was an experiment, and the actors had to be very special actors who’d want to go there with me and trust me. We worked with them for two and a half years before we filmed it.”
9. Pink Flamingos, released in 1972, carried the subtitle “An exercise in poor taste,” and it wasn’t kidding: the picture showed Divine performing oral sex on the actor playing her son.
In a touch of funny irony that I’m sure he finds amusing, John Waters is most known these days for his work to the beautifully wholesome musical Hairspray! However, for the majority of his career, particularly early on, he was recognized for directing some of the raunchiest, most disgusting cult films ever made.
The most well-known of these films is Pink Flamingos, which stars Waters’ longstanding collaborator, drag queen Divine, as a lady named the “filthiest person alive” and her rivals who strive to dethrone her. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know that it finishes with Divine picking up real dog excrement from the ground and eating it.
Equally unsettling is the scene where Divine, excited by defiling her rivals’ home, performs oral sex on the actor portraying her son, Crackers. Understanding what Waters was going for from the vantage of 2020 may be hard, but he told the Washington Post on the film’s 25th anniversary that the film was thumbing its nose at middle-class and suburban values. “We wanted to do cultural terrorism in a funny way,” he said.
The film became a hit across America in underground theaters, although it was declared illegal in places like Hicksville, New York, and Switzerland.
10. Finally, in 1973’s Don’t Look Now, Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland – President Coriolanus Snow from The Hunger Games flicks — had sex on-camera… maybe.
The graphic sex scene in the supernatural thriller, which featured what appeared to be oral sex performed by Sutherland, was widely discussed even before the film’s release, and director Nicolas Roeg had to edit it in a fragmented manner in order for the film to receive an R rating in the United States. The picture received an X classification in the United Kingdom.
For years following the film’s release, allegations persisted about the sequence, with some claiming Christie’s then-boyfriend Warren Beatty campaigned to have the sex scene removed, and others claiming there was an unedited tape of the moment floating around Hollywood that plainly showed them having intercourse.
Finally, in 2011, former movie executive and Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart published his biography Infamous Players, in which he claims to have been on the set and saw the much-hyped scene being recorded. “It was evident to me that they were no longer merely acting; they were (having sex) on camera,” he wrote.
Sutherland vehemently denied Bart’s claim, saying that the sex was simulated and that Bart never saw it because only four people were in the room while filming: the two actors, the director, and the cinematographer. Peter Katz, one of the film’s producers, backed up Sutherland, saying, “While there was a sex scene captured on film, it was not a scene that would lead to the creation of a human being.”
What do you think?
Whether it was simulated or not, they must have done something great because everyone is still talking about it nearly 50 years later!