Rob Lowe is sounding off on how sex scenes are thought about in films today.
While speaking with Sex and The City star Kristin Davis on the Feb. 27 episode of his Literally! podcast, Lowe and Davis discussed how it’s rare to have “sexy movies” nowadays, but Lowe “took it back,” given he saw Nicole Kidman‘s Babygirl which he described as “pretty great.” However, the two went on to candidly discuss about why films are now being considered “brave” for even having sex scenes in them to begin with.
“They’re like, ‘It’s so brave. She’s so brave,’” Lowe said. “She’s brave because she has a sex scene? Like, that’s brave now. In our day, it was required.”
Lowe went on to note that in the early days there would be a “page 73 rule” in the “mid-second act” where the “sex scene was always on page 73” and you “didn’t have to read the whole script” to know if an intimate scene was planned.
“I know, they Blue Lagoon it,” he said, “be with each other on a moonlit night. But, now it’s so brave.”
Davis agreed and said that “things have changed” and “continue to change” in the industry when comparing to their early days.
“I always feel, like, out of chaos comes opportunity,” Lowe added. “My attitude is always you make the most of it [and] disruption is actually a great time to build new things. If you can be one of the nimble ones and you could be one of the forward-thinking ones … not entrenched and not trying to recreate yesterday but try to understand tomorrow, it’s your time.”
For her Hollywood Reporter December cover story, Kidman said she viewed the Babygirl script as being “raw and dangerous” given the film’s “sexuality” and “that it wasn’t written for a 20-year-old” or “written even for a 30-year-old.”
“A lot of times women are discarded at a certain period of their career as a sexual being. So it was really beautiful to be seen in this way. From the minute I read it, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is a voice I haven’t seen, this is a place that I haven’t been, I don’t think audiences have been.’ My character has reached a stage where she’s got all this power, but she’s not sure who she is, what she wants, what she desires, even though she seems to have it all. And I think that’s really relatable,” Kidman said of the film.
“I think it’s very releasing, this film. I hope it is. I’ve had some people say it’s the most disturbing film they’ve ever seen, which I’m like, ‘Oh no, I’m so sorry,’” she added.
Meanwhile on her podcast, Are You a Charlotte?, Davis had a similar discussion when reflecting on how the perception of women has changed since Sex and the City aired. “Look at how people present themselves now. It’s totally normal to have almost everyone on a red carpet in a sheer dress where, potentially, their nipples are showing,” Davis said during her conversation with clinical psychologist Dr. Hillary Goldsher. “Like, this never would have happened back in the olden days.”
She continued, “We were scared about showing our nipples on the show. We were like, ‘Oh my God. They want us to show our nipples.’ We were so worried about it. Right? Like, would we be shunned? Would we be, you know, cast out … by the film world or whatever, which is kind of insane to think about.”
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