Why Kurt Russell refuses to shoot sex scenes: “Fake fucking is tough”
We can all agree that Kurt Russell was, and still is, a handsome man, but he’s spent his entire career avoiding objectification by refusing to shoot any sex scenes, unless the director can state a case compelling enough to convince him that filmic fornication will enhance the movie.
Since very few of the filmmakers he’s worked with have won that argument, he tends to keep his kit on. Of course, actors aren’t obligated to strip down and frolic in front of the cameras for no reason, but you can’t help but admire his dedication and resistance to the beast with two backs.
It even cost him Richard Gere’s iconic role in An Officer and a Gentleman, with John Carpenter’s most famous collaborator turning down the part that caused widespread swooning in cinemas around the world after the director, Taylor Hackford, insisted the love scenes exist ever so slightly “beyond the bounds of good taste.”
Once he heard that, he was out, and he’s willing to make very few exceptions. If, for whatever reason, and we’re not here to judge, you want to see Kurt Russell copulating on the silver screen, you’ll need to trawl through his extensive filmography to dredge up the very few times he’s been willing to do it.
One of them came, for want of a better word, in the 1992 psychological thriller Unlawful Entry, where he and Madeleine Stowe played a happily married couple who have their lives turned upside down when a kindly police officer is revealed to have ulterior, sinister, and decidedly stalker-like motives.
“There’s this scene where Ray Liotta’s this bad cop, and he’s watching me have sex with my wife, and she sees him,” Russell recalled. “OK, then you got a scene, let’s make this work.” That passed the test, but when it’s shagging for the sake of shagging, the actor with more cult classics to his name than almost any other draws a definitive line in the sand.
“In my career, I’ve only done a couple of scenes in which there was open sexuality, and it was always a story point,” he explained. What kind of scenes doesn’t he like? Ones where “they were just letting you know that people like to fuck.” That’s fair enough, with the star’s mantra helping him navigate several conversations with filmmakers where he laid his cards on the table.
“My problem is that everybody knows you’re faking it,” he offered. “That’s just not the way I work. Fake fucking is tough.” Since narrative cinema is a fictional medium, he didn’t need to explain that everyone knows he wouldn’t really be going at his hammer-and-tongs with a co-star, but it would appear that he’s a stickler for immersion and doesn’t buy that viewers would invest in his fabricated thrusts.
Some performers have made their name on parading around in their skivvies and bedding more scene partners than most, but that’s never floated Russell’s boat. Since he’s more than 60 years deep into his career and in his mid-70s, the good news is that it’s highly unlikely anyone will even ask him anymore.
