Aubrey Plaza was reportedly approached to do an unsimulated s** scene for a movie. She has since talked about how bad that was.
The actress, who is now 41, played Brandy Klark in the 2013 bawdy coming-of-age comedy The To Do List. Brandy is a straight-A student who wants to have a lot of s**ual adventures before going to college.
One of them was a moment of self-pleasure, which Plaza assumed would be acted out.
Along with an intimate director, actors frequently wear modesty barriers, prosthetics, or the camera doesn’t show what is really happening, and the s**ual act is suggested.
This wasn’t the case, much to her amazement.
When the movie came out, Plaza told Conan O’Brien that she had thought of something much less scary: I thought of a wonderful scene where you could see my hand gently leave the frame.
She didn’t get to see the camera placed up over her bed. Instead, she came to the set wearing only panties and a Clinton T-shirt, with crew personnel all around her.
She joked that there were a lot of old men smoking, you know, the crew people. She made it clear that they weren’t really smoking; that’s just how she recalls it.
Plaza remembered asking Maggie Carey, the director, what she was meant to do. I said to the director, “What do you want me to do?” And she said, “Do what the script says and masturbate.” The actress put it quite simply: “Then I went and touched myself.”
She thought it would be a private moment, but in her words, it turned out to be “a full-body shot.”
She told Oregon Live that the sequence where she masturbated was the most stressful part of filming. In my brain, I thought, “Oh, we’ll probably shoot this in a way that I don’t really have to do it.”
Plaza subsequently told The Sunday Times that it was the strangest acting job she had ever had, but she applauded Carey for being aware of things that a male director may not be.
She also called the scenario a “nightmare.”
Carey said that Plaza was “game for anything” and that she always put comedy ahead of ego.
It’s a good thing Plaza could see the comic side of this, since other people could have felt really bad about it.