The deleted James Bond scene too steamy for cinema: “We had pretty fantastic sex”
Even though he adds at least one new notch to his bedpost with every outing, the sex scenes in the James Bond franchise have never crossed the line into R-rated territory, for obvious reasons.
That reason is, of course, money. Everybody knows that 007 is a mad shagger, since audiences have been conditioned that way since 1962, and for all of his frolics between the sheets, none of the protagonist’s antics in the boudoir have been overly scintillating, saucy, or gratuitous.
There have been plenty of gratuitous moments across the saga’s 25-film existence, but the filmmakers have always drawn the line at making things too hot and heavy in the bedroom, because what’s the point in spending a fortune on a blockbuster spy movie and then eliminating its entire PG-13 audience?
To be more accurate, though, it has as much to do with the censors as it does the director, or even Eon Productions. Take Lee Tahamori, for instance; the Die Another Day helmer seemed pretty pleased with himself that he’d captured the most salacious sex sequence in Bond history, and he didn’t intimate that his paymasters had any issues with it. However, the ratings board definitely did.
“In lovemaking, Bond’s PG requirements have traditionally meant that you can only show post-coital sex,” he explained, which is why so many of Bond’s conquests have revolved around pillow talk after the fact. “You know, clothes strewn around the room, the camera slowly pans over the bed. But we thought, why couldn’t Bond have the best lay of his life?”
Shoot it all you want, but when the time comes to sneak it past the censors, it’s a foregone conclusion. Tamahori went ahead with it anyway, describing a “very hot love scene” between Pierce Brosnan’s Bond and Rosamund Pike’s Miranda Frost, but it sounded as though he knew what was coming: “Whether it survives the censor’s cut, or the producers, we’ll see.”
Suffice to say, it did not, and the sequence the filmmaker called “the sexiest ever filmed” by any 007 production was left on the cutting room floor to ensure that the landmark 20th instalment wasn’t hit with an R-rating. As for Pike, who’s since come to bemoan her former status as a ‘Bond girl’, she sounded fairly enthused at the time, confirming that, alongside Brosnan, “We had pretty fantastic sex.”
Despite only having a handful of credits to her name and never appearing in a movie before, Pike was excited for the world to see her feature-length debut, titillating or not. “I got to be very physical in the role,” the actor explained. “It should change some perceptions of me.”
It did, just not in the way that she wanted. After Die Another Day, Pike has voiced her regrets on several occasions, even pretending that she wasn’t the ‘Bond girl’ she was claimed to be when out and about on public transport. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s probably for the best that the sequence got the scissors.
