A then-19-years-old Reese Witherspoon did not want to film the sex scene in Fear
“I didn’t have control over it,” said the The Morning Show actor of her role in the 1996 flick
We’ve heard a lot about intimacy coordinators in recent months. Discourse has swirled around what exactly they do in the first place, how extra cool it is to have two intimacy coordinators on your show, and of course, whether sex scenes are even necessary to story-telling in the first place. Through all this noise, however, one thing remains abundantly clear: when a show or film doesn’t employ intimacy coordinators, things go wrong. Actors get uncomfortable and boundaries get crossed. No one should ever have to expose themselves to an unsafe environment like that, especially in such a public manner.
In a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Reese Witherspoon added yet another example to this unfortunately growing list. When she was only 19 years old, Witherspoon starred in the 1996 psychological thriller Fear alongside then-25-year-old Mark Wahlberg. The film features a scene where Wahlberg’s character gives Witherspoon’s an orgasm while the couple rides a rollercoaster.
“I didn’t have control over it,” Witherspoon said of filming the scene, and noted that she requested a body double for “below-the-waist” shots. “It wasn’t explicit in the script that that’s what was going to happen, so that was something that I think the director [James Foley] thought of on his own and then asked me on set if I would do it, and I said no. It wasn’t a particularly great experience.”
While this experience didn’t “traumatize” Witherspoon, the actor does consider it “formative” in her mission to back women and women’s stories in such a historically male-dominated industry—a calling which led her to begin her own production company, Hello Sunshine, in 2016. Since its inception, Hello Sunshine has undeniably changed the landscape of the industry with critical and commercial darlings such as Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere, Where The Crawdads Sing, and Daisy Jones & The Six, which was nominated for nine Emmys yesterday.
“It’s just a new time, a new era for women to succeed and excel,” the actor said. “I’m happy to be the rocket fuel they need.”