By now, everyone is well aware that even though Bridgerton Season 2 was a much slower-burning affair than the Regency romance’s freshman outing (with all those sexy sex scenes), Bridgerton still knows how to get down with the getting down when the time is right. Seeing as how the second season focused on Anthony and Kate, this means that Bridgerton Season 2 cast newcomer Simone Ashley played a big part in those on-screen sexytimes, but she just revealed that her weirdest sex scene preparation story actually involves a different Netflix series: Sex Education.
What Did Bridgerton’s Simone Ashley Say About Preparing For Sex Scenes On Sex Education?
For those of you who are still unaware, Simone Ashley was already known to many Netflix viewers before landing the South Asian rep role of Kate Sharma on Bridgerton, because of her three seasons on the teen dramedy, Sex Education. As you may be able to tell from the title of that series, the characters' romances and sex lives are a big part of the story, meaning that Ashley had her fair share of scenes of a sexual nature while playing mean girl, Olivia.
And, as she recently told The Envelope podcast, the way the Sex Education cast prepared for those scenes was a bit weird. They set up “a sex intimacy workshop” so that the young cast could have a “safe, intimate space” to talk about sex and what would be expected while doing sex scenes, which actually sounds lovely, but then Ashley said:
And we explored the movement of different animals to kind of portray different paces or different sexualities or how sensual something could be. For example, we look to how snails mate, and when snails mate, they actually produce a plasma that intertwines. So if it was a really sensual, slow kind of scene, we'd be like, 'Oh, it's like the snail.' And it's super like the plasma, falling like honey. So we would make it about that or how dogs mate or chimpanzees mate. It's very fast-paced and a different kind of style. So this kind of scene, we're going to make it very funny and quirky and just silly, and let's think of like, this animal.
I will admit, I had to read what Ashley said a few times and really think about it to get past my immediate “OMG, what?!” feelings about how she and her Sex Education co-stars got ready for their sex scenes. As odd as it seems (much like the silly way some of those Bridgerton sexytimes were filmed), though, it really does make some good sense. Obviously, no one person is going to have sex the same way as any other person, or have sex the same way all the time whether they’re with the same partner or not.
And, it simply would not increase any of the performers’ feelings of safety / comfort to, say, prepare by watching other people have sex, even if it was simulated. So, the only logical answer, honestly, is to watch a variety of animals and insects (Are snails insects? You know what, never mind. I’ll Google it later.) do the natural naughty and figure out how that activity could apply to the particular sex scene they were about to do.
Simone Ashley did say that working on Sex Education was a really “great platform” for her work on Bridgerton and career as a whole for figuring out how to simulate adult time. While she’s noted previously that the sex on the two shows is very different, Ashley did also say that she felt “very comfortable, very confident, and safe” filming sex scenes on both Netflix series, so all the snail-watching prep clearly worked wonders. Also, snails are animals, so score one point for education today!
