No matter what your career is, it’s important to set personal and professional boundaries. Whether that’s refusing to do work when you’re off the clock or just making a rule that you never work on your birthday (like me), it’s important to know where your boundaries lie for peace of mind. When you’re an actor, those boundaries can involve some very different elements, including performing in sex scenes. Though sex scenes may be awkward to film (unless you’re Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh), they are often a necessary and important part of storytelling because sexuality is a part of the human experience. So, how do actors navigate their own boundaries when it comes to filming sex scenes? For Jada Pinkett Smith, it’s always been about one simple rule.
On Lena Waithe’s podcast “Legacy Talk” (via People), Pinkett Smith explained that despite the fact that she’s acted in several love scenes onscreen over the years, she has an no nudity rule that helps her feel protected. She also shared her feelings about filming love scenes before the introduction of intimacy coordinators, who help protect actors while filming sex scenes.
Pinkett Smith had a no nudity rule for love scenes
On Waithe’s podcast, the pair discussed Pinkett Smith’s long career and some of the challenges she faced along the way, including navigating love scenes. Pinkett Smith first had to figure out how to approach sex scenes for her role as Lida “Stony” Newsome in F. Gary Gray’s 1996 heist movie “Set It Off, which we included in our rundown of Black films that aren’t in the Criterion Collection (but definitely should be). In one scene in “Set It Off,” Stony has sex with her new boss, Nate (Charles Robinson), in order to convince him to give her an advance on her first payment. Pinkett Smith described the scene as “being so difficult” to film initially, but by “making sure that only the necessary people were on the set,” Gray and his crew made her feel more comfortable. She described the experience to Waithe, saying:
“It was a very different time, but luckily enough, all of the men that [I] ever engaged with in that way were so respectful and took such good care of me. And even the directors did as much as they could to have as much privacy that they knew to have at that time.”
She also noted that she has a “no nudity” rule that has “always been the case,” something that many actors choose to implement as a means of keeping some things private. Some of her hottest scenes haven’t even really involved sex at all, like her frisky hello with Elizabeth Banks in “Magic Mike XXL” or even her little make-out scene with Kofi Siriboe in the surprise hit “Girls Trip.” It’s great that she’s managed to find a way to set healthy boundaries in her acting that make her feel secure, and even better that she was taken care of on the set of “Set It Off” all those years ago. Acting is a complicated job with unusual risks, and it’s lovely when someone manages to avoid the worst pitfalls in the filmmaking world.