Adèle Exarchopoulos Did Not Want to Be Nude in ‘Passages’: How Can We ‘Reinvent’ Intimacy Onscreen Without Nudity?
“Blue Is the Warmest Color” alum Adèle Exarchopoulos opted to stay clothed for Ira Sachs’ erotic psychological drama “Passages.”
The actress revealed to Vogue that she explained to co-star Franz Rogowski she preferred to not appear nude onscreen and to instead convey intimacy with half-dressed sex scenes instead. (That’s true in her case, though Rogowski and Ben Whishaw appear nude in one sex scene.) Exarchopoulos plays a schoolteacher who begins an affair with queer director Tomas (Rogowski), despite his marriage to Martin (Whishaw). The film landed an NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association (MPA); distributor MUBI decided to release the film unrated. “Passages” director Sachs told IndieWire that the rating was “censorship,” criticizing the MPA as “an extension of the Hays Code, which was written by the Catholic Church.”
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“I told [Franz], ‘I don’t want to be nude. But I agreed to play intimacy — sex. So how can we reinvent it?,’” Exarchopoulos said in the Vogue interview. “And he was really conscious about how I felt.”
She continued, “With Franz, he has something really animal, straight, masculine — because he completely assumes his femininity. There is something really alive when you play with him.”
The actress noted that the film is “about the flesh, about desire” and captures the electric pull of attraction regardless of gender. The characters are never labeled as gay, straight, or bisexual in the film.
“I love that it’s not the subject of the film, that they’re homosexual and one loves a girl. It’s just, like, this is a couple [who has been together a long time] and they face the fact that one of them is going to cross a boundary and take the risk of losing the other one,” she said. “Since day one, after dancing with [Tomas], she knows she will have something with him. It’s rare, but we all experience the fact that you meet someone and after, like, 15 minutes, you know that one day — maybe in 10 years, maybe in 10 minutes — you will have sex with this person. You just feel it.”
Exarchopoulos previously appeared fully nude in the controversial lesbian romance “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” a film that she told The Los Angeles Times that “Passages” director Ira Sachs hadn’t seen before they began production on the new film. Exarchopoulos and her “Blue Is the Warmest Color” co-star Léa Seydoux have had a complicated relationship to that film’s frank sex scenes since it debuted in 2013.
“It was funny that he didn’t see it. When he told me, of course I never dared to say, ‘You should watch “Blue,”!'” Exarchopoulos said. “He’s able to really observe, and he’s someone with no judgment.”
She further addressed the role of intimacy coordinators on set, despite “Passages” not having one, saying, “I think sexual intimacy coordinators are important because it’s hard to [discuss] in front of 10 people, ‘Are you agreeing to [take off] your bra?’ I think you are even more free when there are boundaries and limits — otherwise, even for the male, he doesn’t know what he should do, should not do. Everyone gets scared. You can find more creativity when you know the territory than when you explore with clumsiness and with no coordinator. It’s a good thing, to be honest — I don’t think it will block inspiration.”
“Passages” is now in select theaters from MUBI.
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