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Can I, uh, get you a drink?
asks Connell as they stand in his front hallway.
Uh, yeah, she says.
The two make embarrassing teenage small talk as they build up the courage to make moves.
You have a lot of posters, remarks Marianne as she sits on Connells bed, alone.
What theyre really asking:But do you like me?
Am I lovable?Marianne looks Connell directly in the eyes.
He stands up, cups her face, and kisses her.
Now can we take our clothes off?
she asks, with the sweet impatience of someone whos been imagining a moment for a very long time.
Connell laughs and says that yes, they can.
He demurs, telling her, If anything, you seduced me.
As they start to touch each other, they both stop to ask, Is that okay?
They grab a condom.
We have to work in a better way.
OBrien kicked off the process of structuring the shows intimate scenes quite early on.
I didnt want Daisy to judge me or think that I was borderline insane.
I was bent over because I was trying not to look at you.
Youre friends with all the crew.
Were all having lunch together.
So you have to be able to laugh.
And Ita just created an environment that was pressure-free, Edgar-Jones says.
Abrahamson in particular knew exactly how he wanted the scenes to look and feel.
And then, of course, he wanted actual nudity, too, to make their relationship feel authentic.
Lenny spoke about the palette of nakedness, says OBrien.
Postcoitally, he wanted them to just naturally be lying there.
I was totally surprised by the fact that there would be any other way of doing it.
If youre going to do the book correctly, I think thats required.
Both actors were thrilled but a little bit frightened by the volume and raw nature of the scenes.
That is going to be out there forever, he says.
OBrien describes it as full-on intercourse with quite passionate content.
Looking back, she says Abrahamson was absolutely right to kick things off that way.
It takes away the fear around it.
It makes it professional, says OBrien.
If we didnt want to do anything, we were never ever made to do anything.
We always felt that we had the right to say, Ah, Im not keen on that.
And within those very clear boundaries, Edgar-Jones and Mescal felt the freedom to play around.
For those long takes, I remember being fully locked out above Daisy.
Rarely did a sex scene go by without at least one of the two actors dissolving into laughter.
I would just love for people to see the outtakes, adds Mescal.
You never want to have pubic bone to pubic bone.
You might have thigh into thigh, or a hand to a leg instead.
OBrien says just as much planning went into conveying the bad sex as the good.
We talk about a missed rhythm, a disconnect with the gaze.
We talk about how important the gaze is between Marianne and Connell, and then we mismatch.
Edgar-Jones says she delighted in the challenge of conveying a bad lay.
Those scenes were always so funny, says Edgar-Jones.
On the call sheet, its like, Marianne has average sex.
Its quite fun to act like someone who is just a bit disinterested in it.
OBrien worked with Mescal to convey that shock directly with his body.
He had to recoil from that and go, No, I cant go there, she says.
He just cant continue and has to withdraw.
After shooting a particularly intense scene like that, OBrien says shed help the actors wash the character away.
Id invite a visualization of standing under a waterfall and cascading it down, she says.
Sometimes Id say, Take your shoes and socks off and go and walk on the grass.
Whats important is that an actor chooses something that works for them, and its a conscious shift.
Youre consciously going,Im letting go of this, and then stepping back to yourself.
But neither Mescal nor Edgar-Jones seems to have been disturbed by the darker sexual moments they created together.
I actually have so many fond memories of shooting those scenes, says Mescal.
I think Daisy and I fundamentally really trusted each other throughout.
Thats another part of the puzzle.
I would never ever settle for anything less than the way it was handled.
Abrahamson left it all in.
The majority of those scenes are us corpsing in some capacity, says Edgar-Jones.
Like, when Mariannes bra gets stuck, we were actually laughing at it.
Mescal shakes his head infauxshame.
You do all the blocking all morning, he says.
And I was like, Ive forgotten how to do the clasp!
Any sense of eroticism, as always, was completely fabricated.
It was horrible, says Edgar-Jones.
Mescal echoes the sentiment.
Andrew [OReilly], our focus puller, hes quite a sweaty man in general.
Hes just one of those people who sweats.
Pointlessly, deadpans Mescal.
Apparently, its a really great moisturizer, says Edgar-Jones, laughing.
We had very soft skin by the end of the project.
