Henry Cavill doesn’t understand the need for sex scenes

Argylle isn’t lighting up the box offices (in retrospect, they should’ve just lied and said Taylor Swift really did write it), but it still has so many famous actors in it doing the promotional cycle and they need something to talk about. That brings us to the latest episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, during which host Josh Horowitz decided to resurrect the whole “sex scene” discourse from a while back. And get this: Henry Cavill is not a fan of them.

Cavill said that sex scenes “can be great in a movie and can really help with the storytelling,” but he says that’s not usually the case. He says they’re “overused these days” and are just there for the sake of naked people rather than being actually “beneficial to a movie.” He says that it gets “uncomfortable” when you start to question whether or not a sex scene is “really necessary” or if it’s just “people with less clothing on,” because, he says, “there’s not a performance here, there’s not a piece which is going to carry through to the rest of the movie.”

He also argues that filling a show or movie with sex scenes is a “cop out” if there’s not really a point to it, because “most of the time the human imagination is going to trump it” anyway. Argylle director Matthew Vaughn, who was also there for the podcast, is on the same page as Cavill and noticed that he doesn’t really direct a lot of sex scenes, saying, “I can’t get my head around [them].” Vaughn also jokes that he and Cavill are just “English prudes,” but it doesn’t really seem like much of a joke once you skim through their respective filmographies. Violence? Yes. Big action set pieces? Oh yeah. Sex? Not really.