The James Gandolfini and Kate Winslet sex scene that never happened
Sex scenes aren’t for everyone, a sentiment that’s equally applicable to performers and viewers. Not to suggest that neither actor was comfortable doing it, but one filmmaker found a novel way of shooting an intimate moment between James Gandolfini and Kate Winslet that technically didn’t happen.
The gradual introduction and increasing importance of intimacy coordinators have made things a lot more comfortable for the talent, but at the end of the day, it’s up to the actors whether they want to do it or not. That hasn’t always been the case, unfortunately, but modernity tends to win out in the long run.
The Sopranos figurehead Gandolfini and Academy Award winner Winslet played lovers in a 2004 musical romantic comedy, with the former’s wonderfully-named Nick Murder having an affair with the latter’s lingerie shop worker Tula, unbeknownst to Susan Sarandon’s spouse Kitty Kane Murder.
To illustrate the extramarital relations, Romance & Cigarettes saw writer, director, and producer John Turturro decide it was necessary for the pair to bump uglies onscreen. Interestingly, that didn’t necessarily mean Gandolfini and Winslet even had to be in the same room at the same time, with ingenuity taking precedence.
“A sex scene is really hilarious because it’s usually so unsexy,” Turturro explained to Stephen Colbert. “It’s like being in the dentist’s office, really.” To make his sex scene as sexy as possible, he decided the easiest way to get the best out of the components forming the beast with two backs was to keep them as far away from each other as possible.
“They were going to be too inhibited,” Turturro explained of the star-powered pairing. “So I decided to take James out of the scene and put Kate on a bouncy ball. The problem was when we did James, how to connect them. So I took Kate’s wig, and as James was having sex, I took Kate’s wig in front of the camera.”
Trickery was afoot, and apologies to anyone who enjoyed watching the duo go at it in Romance & Cigarettes, but any shots of Winslet captured when Gandolfini was on-screen were actually Turturro waving a disembodied wig around like a madman.
The director found the moment “really sexy because they’re completely free because they’re not together,” with the isolation and knowledge, they were going to be the only person in the shot freeing them up to go for broke in simulating some saucy fornication. There’s definitely a sex scene in Romance & Cigarettes between Gandolfini and Winslet, even if Turturro decided the best way to make the most of the copulation was to shoot them separately.
Then again, Gandolfini thrusting away like a man possessed while the guy who played Jesus in The Big Lebowski stands in front of Tony Soprano with his hand inside Winslet’s fake hair to lend a sultry assist makes for a surreal mental image.
