Aubrey Plaza was once asked to perform an unsimulated sex scene for a movie, and she has since spoken out about the "nightmare".
The actress, now 41, starred in the 2013 raunchy coming-of-age comedy The To Do List as Brandy Klark, a straight-A student who sets out to tackle a list of sexual experiences before heading to college.
Among them was a moment of self-pleasure — a scene Plaza thought would be simulated.
Alongside an intimacy director, performers are usually equipped with modesty barriers, prosthetics or the camera doesn't show what is actually happening and the sexual act is implied.
Much to her surprise, this wasn't actually the case.
Speaking to Conan O’Brien back when the film was released, Plaza admitted she had envisioned something far tamer: “In my head, I envisioned a nice scene where you see my hand slowly go out of frame.”
Instead, she arrived on set to find the camera mounted above her bed, wearing just underwear and a Clinton T-shirt, surrounded by crew members.
“There were a bunch of old men smoking, you know, the crew guys,” she joked, clarifying they weren’t actually smoking — that’s just how she remembers it.
Plaza recalled asking director Maggie Carey what exactly she was supposed to do. “I asked the director, ‘What should I do?’ And she said, ‘Masturbate, like it says in the script.’” The actress summed it up bluntly: “Then I went and touched myself.”
What she expected to be a discreet moment ended up being, in her words, “a full-body shot.”
Looking back, she told Oregon Live that the masturbation scene was “the most nerve-racking” part of filming. “Just because in my head I thought, oh, we’ll probably shoot this in a way where I don’t really have to really do it.”
Plaza later told The Sunday Times the experience was “the weirdest acting job I’ve ever had in my life,” but praised Carey for being “sensitive to things that maybe a male director wouldn’t be sensitive to.”
She also referred to the scene as a "nightmare".
Carey, for her part, described Plaza as “game for anything” and someone who always prioritized comedy over vanity.
It's a good thing that Plaza could see the funny side of this - others might have been pretty uncomfortable.