Emilia Clarke has left viewers stunned after revealing that she broke a rib while filming sex scenes with 3 men for hours.
The Game of Thrones alum, now 39, is starring in Ponies, a Cold War thriller on Peacock, and while it may be packed with spying and political tension, it was the intimate scenes that turned out to be the most physically taxing.
Cold War Drama With a Brutal Twist
Clarke plays Bea, a secretary at the US Embassy in 1970s Moscow, who’s actually a CIA asset sent to seduce high-level KGB agents.
The job calls for more than a sharp mind and a steady hand... it also involves a steady stream of sex scenes.
Speaking to The Wrap, Clarke recalled a particularly brutal day on set: “Three men, in a number of hours. Just keep bringing it - I’m going to sit on this thing, you’re going to bring them in, we’re going to pretend to have sex. I broke a rib that day.”
Her co-star Haley Lu Richardson, who fans will recognize from The White Lotus Season 2, confirmed the on-set mishap, saying: “She’s such a tiny little sensitive body, meant she broke a rib.”
Richardson also added that there was a whole parade of men coming through the makeup trailer after the shoot. “I was like ‘So how was it?’ They were like ‘Yeah! (panting)‘” she recalled.
The Me Before You star said when she visited her doctor with the injury, they asked how she did it, and she didn't sugarcoat it: "Sex! Times three!"
"It didn’t fully break," she clarified. "It just popped out a little bit."
When Acting Get Too Real
While Clarke’s scenes were simulated, they still evoke the kind of physical and emotional intensity that’s becoming more common in Hollywood, where the line between performance and reality keeps getting blurrier.
For example, Aubrey Plaza once shared on Conan that she was asked to perform an unsimulated sex act for the movie, Take The To Do List.
"In my head, I envisioned a nice scene where you just see my hand slowly go out of frame," she said. "I thought I was doing one thing and when I showed up it was a whole different thing, it was a full body shot and I asked the director 'what should I do' and she said 'masturbate like it says in the script.'"
Willem Dafoe also experienced the same thing in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, where he had to be body-doubled because, in the director’s words, the actor was “too well endowed” and showing him would “confuse audiences.”
Meanwhile, Chloë Sevigny left critics reeling with her unsimulated oral sex scene in The Brown Bunny, later admitting: “I’ve done many explicit sex scenes, but I’m not that interested in doing any more...I’m more self-aware now and wouldn’t be able to be as free, so why even do it?”