Sex sells, as they say, and that means that sex in movies and on television (where allowed) is as popular now as it has ever been. However, Julianne Moore, who has filmed her share of those scenes over the years, has a problem with movie sex scenes. She doesn't think they shouldn't exist, but she says it would be nice if they resembled real life sex a bit more. Moore would apparently have a real problem if an actual sexual encounter played out the way it frequently does on the big screen. According to the actress...
People never have sex the way they do in the movies. You see that in these old sexy movies where somebody rips somebody’s blouse off. I’d be so upset if someone tore the buttons off my shirt. [laughing] I’d be ‘What are you doing?'
It has to be said, I'd love to see a scene in a movie where two people begin to have sex, only to have the encounter stopped cold when he rips her shirt and she screams "dude, what the hell? That was a perfectly good shirt." I feel like in real life that would totally kill the mood. More than one actual sexual encounter has probably ended because somebody tried to recreate what they'd seen in the movies only to discover it doesn't really work like that.
Sex is almost always perfect and passionate in the movies. Of course, while the characters and stories and films are meant to be relatable, they're also meant to be somewhat larger than life. Everything is always perfect in the movies, including the sex.
Julianne Moore tells People she wanted her new film, Gloria Bell, to portray sex a bit more realistically. In this case, that meant making the sex look a bit more awkward than we're used to seeing on screen. Her character begins a new relationship in the film, so the sex isn't full of Hollywood magic, because that's rarely if ever what sex looks like, especially the first time.
I do think that sex is challenging especially with someone brand new. It’s easy to have sex with someone you’ve known for a really long time. What we wanted to depict in Gloria Bell was the reality of that. We wanted it to be real and not fake.
Not every movie needs to have perfectly realistic sex scenes. Those scenes, like all the others, should fit together in a way that makes sense. Gloria Bell is very much a movie about reality. It focuses on Julianne Moore as the title character, an older woman trying to navigate her life. It's a very grounded movie and making the sex scenes feel anything less than real would have been a disservice to the rest of the film.
Gloria Bell is in theaters now.
