Mark Rylance, a famous British actor, once said that he had real s** in a movie that caused a lot of controversy.
The New Yorker says that the movie is Int!macy, a controversial 2001 drama that shocked viewers with its real s** scenes and left Rylance with some major regrets.
Rylance plays Jay in Int!macy, a London bartender who used to be a musician but now has passionate, secret s**ual encounters with a woman (Kerry Fox) on a daily basis.
As time goes on, their relationship, which is emotionally raw and physically expressive, becomes more complicated.
The movie doesn’t hold back. It has a graphic, real-life oral s** scene that got a lot of attention and sparked a lot of debate right away. Tanya Krzywinska, a researcher, even said that the scenes made it clear to viewers that penetration had taken place.
Int!macy won Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival, but the real-life repercussions was much worse for Rylance.
Rylance told The Wall Street Journal in 2015 how hard the shoot was. He stated that made me feel bad about my life for two months. I shouldn’t have done it, but I thought Patrice was putting too much pressure on me to do it on set.
At that point, though, I didn’t have the confidence as an actor to say no. A lot of actors that people claim are hard to work with are just being smart, I think.
In a 2016 web chat with The Guardian, Rylance said further about why he took the part when a fan asked him. He was honest in his answer.
He claimed that int!macy was the hardest job he has ever had. Hanif Kureishi’s writing and Patrice Chéreau’s words made me believe that this was a really realistic and important narrative about how hard it is for people to discover closeness in a big metropolis like London.
I know Hanif Kureishi’s work couldn’t have been more personal and revealing, but creating the movie and all the media and personal attacks that followed were very, very hard for me. And I wish I hadn’t done it.
The film’s explicitness didn’t simply affect Rylance. Kerry Fox’s boyfriend said in public that he had a hard time with the role’s demands.
He wrote for The Guardian that it wasn’t going to be a trick. If Kerry took the job, the s** in Int!macy would be much more intense than the usual quickie in most mainstream movies. This s** would be real to some extent that can’t be put into words.
Int!macy is still polarizing, even if it is quite honest.
It has a 66% rating on Rotten Tomatoes right now. Some reviews called it “imaginative” and “interesting,” while others didn’t like how realistic it was.