Viola Davis has declared that she will only film a love scene if her on-screen partner has a big stomach, arguing that this would likely strengthen the scene’s plot.
The 60-year-old actor expressed her distaste for watching and filming sex scenes during Tuesday’s episode of Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast. She said that once she finished working on her hit ABC drama, How to Get Away with Murder, in 2020, she decided that she’d only do a sex scene on one condition.
“I’m not doing any more love scenes. That’s it. You write a love scene, I’m not doing it,” she said. “Unless you give me a boyfriend who has a stomach. A big gut.”
“And you know why? Because you’ll actually write the scene. It won’t be about taking off the shirt and the six-pack abs.”
Davis recalled filming one such scene with Billy Brown in How to Get Away with Murder, in which her character, Annalise Keating, “sleeps with a lot of people.”
“I’m lying down and everything, and then he gets up with his underwear, and they’re literally just taking his underwear down, putting his makeup on,” she said, referring to the film crew. “And he’s got his abs. And then they want him to walk into the bathroom and come out with one of those scrub brushes and slap it on his hand as if he’s slapping my ass.”
“It’s a freaking nightmare,” she said of the scene.
“So I said, ‘If you write someone with a gut, maybe we won’t be in bed. Maybe it’ll be about everything else. And then when we finally kiss, it’s like something that’s organically happening,” she continued.
Davis then joked about how she feels when watching sex scenes in general.
“But right now, for me, a lot of love scenes, it’s like, that’s the time to go to the bathroom,” the Fences star, who’s been married to actor Julius Tennon since 2003, concluded.
Back when she was filming How to Get Away with Murder, Davis shared a few rules she had set for sex scenes. During a 2016 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, she said that she would not be “thrown up against the wall.”
“They threw me up against a wall the first season and I threw my back out for two weeks and my hip, so I limped around for two weeks,” she explained at the time. “So I said, ‘No more walls.’”
“I just said, ‘I want to be on the bed. I don’t want to move. I don’t want anyone on top of me. I don’t want to be on top of anybody else.’”
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