Henry Cavill is opening up about filming intimate scenes in movies and TV shows, and he’s honestly “not a fan” of them.
The Argylle star made a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast with director Matthew Vaughn and admitted that he feels those vulnerable moments onscreen should be left to the “human imagination.”
“I don’t understand them, I’m not a fan,” Cavill expressed about sex scenes. “I think there are circumstances where a sex scene actually is beneficial to a movie, rather than just the audience, but I think sometimes they’re overused these days.”
The Witcher actor continued, “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 which is going to carry through to the rest of the movie’.”
Though Cavill noted that there are times when “sex scenes can be great in a movie and can really help with the storytelling,” he just isn’t convinced that it’s as often as they’re currently used in projects.
“Most of the time the human imagination is going to trump it,” the Enola Holmes star added. “So it can be a little bit of a cop out if a TV show or a movie is just filled with gyrating bodies and you’re going, ‘Okay, but what is this doing for us apart from the idea of, oh naked person, great.’”
Vaughn also shared a similar perspective when it comes to filming intimate scenes.
“The thing I really don’t understand — and you’ve noticed I don’t really direct them because I can’t get my head around [them] — [is] sex scenes,” he said. “It’s just something I don’t understand.”
The actor and director aren’t the only Hollywood notables who would prefer to forgo or limit the sex scenes they partake in onscreen.
Penn Badgley revealed last year that he asked You showrunner Sera Gamble if they could cut back on the intimacy in the Netflix show’s fourth season. While his comments created some discourse online, he later clarified his stance.
“What I was speaking about wasn’t actually the final product,” he told GQ at the time. “It was sort of like the culture inherent to the production of all movies but particularly those scenes. It’s like, look, we know that Hollywood has had a history of flagrant exploitation and abuse.
Cavill’s latest movie, Argylle, which sees him playing a secret agent who’s on a mission to unravel a global spy syndicate, is currently playing in theaters.