The 2012 scene that embarrassed Chloë Sevigny: “I felt like a freak”
Even though the internet is absolutely chock-full to bursting point of actual porn (so I’m told, I wouldn’t know), not much fascinates folk more than when actors are supposed to actually have ‘done the deed’ on camera. There have been plenty of famous instances over the years, but not many more famous than Chloë Sevigny and her scene in The Brown Bunny.
For the uninitiated, or for people like me that have never tried to find sex scenes online, The Brown Bunny was a 2003 erotic drama directed by Vincent Gallo that featured an uncensored fellatio scene between him and Sevigny which caused all manner of controversy at the time, with the actor having to come out with a statement that she and Gallo were dating to try to soften the outrage a bit.
Whether or not the scene contributed to the movie losing some $10million at the box office, or if it was the fact that some critics described it as the worst film ever made, it certainly put Sevigny’s name all over the tabloids at the start of the 2000s, although she’d already made a stir in Hollywood some years before it.
She basically started to take on controversial movies right out of the gate, making a debut in Larry Clark’s Kids in 1995 and then making Boys Don’t Cry with Hilary Swank in 1999, the story of a Nebraskan trans man trying to find love, for which she was nominated for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ at the Academy Awards the following year.
As though those two movies weren’t enough boundary pushing, she then turned down a role with Reese Witherspoon on Legally Blonde and instead went on to work with European cinema’s enfant terrible of the 2000s, Lars von Trier, on Dogville, the three-hour-long arthouse movie with Nicole Kidman on the run from the mob that some thought was genius, and others felt was interminably pretentious.
That was the same year as The Brown Bunny, and for some time, Sevigny struggled to get out from under the weight of the scandal with Gallo’s movie. For a few years, she took small roles in movies but didn’t have anything that could be considered a hit, or even particularly popular, until HBO’s series Big Love, opposite Bill Paxton, a drama about polygamy that ran for five seasons and earned her a Golden Globe win in 2010.
Once that wrapped, she spent some time on these shores, first making the Howard Marks bio Mr Nice with Rhys Ifans and then signing up for 2012’s TV miniseries Hit and Miss, in which Sevigny played a contract killer who also happened to be a pre-op transgender male. The concept of the show wasn’t an issue for her whatsoever, as she told Metro, saying, “My manager, a really brash New York Jew, said: ‘This is the craziest script I’ve ever read.’ I was like: ‘That sounds great. I love crazy.’”
But there were moments that she did find very challenging, especially a shower scene in which she had to wear a fake male appendage. She added, “Filming with a prosthetic penis was intimate and embarrassing. It was awful having to put it on. I felt like a freak.”
Nevertheless, Sevigny went straight on to more envelope-pushing with a biopic of porn star Linda Lovelace the next year, and over the last decade, she’s successfully mixed doing TV and movies, picking up an Emmy nomination for Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story in 2024.
