A former Harry Potter star has opened up about filming an orgy scene for a new X-Rated movie which got a eight-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival.
This comes after the overwhelmingly positive reaction that the new film, titled Pillion, received at Cannes this week. The film stars Alexander Skarsgard alongside Harry Melling.
While Melling may not be instantly recognisable nowadays as his Harry Potter character that many would know him for, he first came to prominence for playing Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films.
His newest role however comes in Pillion, in which himself and Skarsgard play a pair of men who begin a BDSM dom/sub sexual relationship.
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Peter Bradshaw was among the many critics to heap praise on the project, saying in his four-star review for The Guardian that it was ‘sweet and extremely revealing’ and that it is essentially ‘what Fifty Shades of Grey should have been’.
Pillion has been one of the surprise hits of Cannes, debuting with a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score.
The film is incredibly raunchy and, though Skarsgard hinted that an even more X-Rated cut of the film exists, of course it required intimacy co-ordinators.
Skarsgard and Melling both spoke to Deadline at Cannes, with Skarsgard discussing the film’s multiple orgy scenes as ‘very fun and playful’.
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He went on to discuss the film’s intimacy co-ordinator, Robbie Taylor Hunt, saying he was ‘fantastic’ at helping it out because ‘it got messy’.
Skarsgard added: “He was terrific in just orchestrating, choreographing it and also knowing when to step back and let us go with it and when to kind of step in.
“Those were exciting days, absolutely.”
Melling himself echoed this trust in Taylor Hunt, stating that this was a key part of filming.
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He said that this was the ‘key word’ in terms of scenes between his and Skarsgard’s character, adding: “I found it personally very easy to trust someone like Alex.
“So yeah, the whole process felt very seamless and easy.”
Melling acknowledged that though doing this may seem ‘daunting’ to others ‘it actually felt like we just every day would turn up and just try and say that story as accurately and as honestly as we could.’
He finally added: “I think the way that [director Harry Lighton] wanted to shoot those more sort of explicit scenes was done in such a clumsy, awkward way.
“It really helped the authenticity of it all, really. So yeah, it was a joy to do.”
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Speaking about the decision to cut the more raunchy original cut of the film, director Lighton said: “It was purely because I didn’t want to push the audience into feeling they were being deliberately shocked by an image.
“So, for example, there was one close up of a d*ck, a hard d*ck… like down the barrel of the lens. And after watching the film, I thought, yeah, cutting it was probably the right decision.”
Topics: Cannes Film Festival, Film, Harry Potter, Sex and Relationships, TV and Film
Michael Slavin