The one thing Samuel L Jackson refuses to do onscreen: “I’m not ready”
Samuel L Jackson has been in a lot of movies. Like, a lot a lot.
According to his IMDb profile, he has a total of 218 acting credits to his name, which goes some way to explaining why he’s the highest-grossing actor of all time.
From superhero epics to auteur-driven dramas to whatever the hell Turbo was, there’s a lot of him out there to sample, and you best believe there are people who know every single one of his movies inside and out.
That being said, even the most diehard of SLJ fanatics would take a long time to get to this entry in his filmography. Released in 2009, Mother and Child is the story of three women whose lives are all linked by the process of adoption. Jackson appears as a lawyer named Paul. He becomes involved with a woman named Elizabeth (Naomi Watts), whose experiences with adoption as a child have left her incapable of forming meaningful relationships.
Paul ends up getting Elizabeth pregnant, which, as you should all hopefully understand, means they have to have sex. This means that Jackson and Watts had to film a sex scene. Despite being a veteran of the game by this point, the former was still uncomfortable when it came to getting on for the big screen. As he told Parade, he considered the possibility that this intimate scene might change his life forever.
“Maybe this will spark some whole new career arc for me,” he pondered. “But I’m not ready for nudity. Believe me, you don’t want to see all of me on a big screen. Naomi and I were going for it, but we kept most of our clothes on.”
By his own admission, Jackson has only done about three sex scenes in his entire career. There’s this one in Mother and Child and another he shares with Juliette Binoche in the historical drama In My Country. Neither gets particularly raunchy, and he definitely doesn’t get his kit off in either example. He does have an unexpected connection to the porn industry, but that’s a story for another time. The star has spoken numerous times about how awkward he finds shooting this kind of material – especially when it comes to dealing with on-set boners – so he will clearly try and avoid it any chance he gets.
As for Watts, she’s no stranger to this sort of thing. Everyone remembers her mesmerising love scene opposite Laura Harring in Mulholland Drive, a movie that didn’t shy away from showing intimate moments. David Lynch got her to drop cloth again when she turned up in Twin Peaks: The Return, and she actually had an on-screen romp with Billy Crudup in the TV show Gypsy six years before they wed in real life. Coincidence? Almost certainly not.
Sex scenes present a unique dilemma. Sometimes they’re absolutely vital to the drama, while in other cases they’re little more than cheap titillation. That’s without factoring in the people who have to perform them and, perhaps even more pressingly, the poor souls who have to watch.
