Famed British actor Mark Rylance once admitted that he performed unsimulated sex in a controversial movie.
That film is Intimacy — the controversial 2001 drama that left audiences stunned with its unsimulated sex scenes and left Rylance with some serious regrets, per The New Yorker.
In Intimacy, Rylance played Jay, a failed musician turned bartender in London who regularly meets with a woman (played by Kerry Fox) for intense, anonymous sexual encounters.
Over time, their emotionally raw and physically explicit relationship spirals into something more complicated.
The film doesn’t hold back. It features a graphic, unsimulated oral sex scene that immediately drew attention and stirred controversy. Researcher Tanya Krzywinska even noted the scenes left viewers “in little doubt that penetration has occurred.”
While Intimacy won Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival, the real-life fallout was far more painful for Rylance.
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal in 2015, Rylance revealed how difficult the shoot was. “It soured me on my life two months,” he said. “It’s my mistake, but I felt Patrice put undue pressure on me on set to do that."
“And at that point I didn’t have the confidence as a film actor to say no. Now I think a lot of actors that people say are difficult are actually just being sensible.”
Rylance opened up further in a 2016 web chat with The Guardian, when a fan asked why he took the role. His response was candid.
“Intimacy was the most difficult job I've ever had," he said. “Hanif Kureishi's work and Patrice Chéreau's words convinced me it was a very true and vital story about the difficulties people face finding intimacy in a big city like London."
"I know Hanif Kureishi's writing couldn't have been more intimate and revealing, but I found the making of the film and the subsequent publicity and personal attacks very, very painful. And I wish I hadn't made it.”
The film’s explicit nature didn’t just impact Rylance. Kerry Fox’s own partner publicly admitted he struggled with the role’s demands.
Writing for The Guardian, he said: “It wasn't going to be a trick. If Kerry accepted the role, the sex in Intimacy would be far more demanding than the normal perfunctory erotic interlude of most mainstream movies. To some indefinable degree, this sex would be real.”
Despite - or perhaps because of - its raw honesty, Intimacy remains divisive.
It currently holds a 66 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, with some critics calling it “imaginative” and “interesting,” while others were put off by its extreme realism.