Emma Stone had to “intimately” touch her co-star Olivia Colman on the set of The Favourite, in a sex scene involving a “wet sponge”. The Hollywood icon teamed up with Peep Show star Olivia in the 2018 film, where Olivia played Queen Anne and Emma played Baroness Abigail Masham.
The film follows the fragile Queen Anne as England is at war with France, while her close friend Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz) runs the country for her sick friend. When a new maid, Abigail, arrives, Sarah takes her under her wing and she is determined to return to her aristocratic roots.
But the situation quickly became quite awkward. Olivia recounted the scene on The Graham Norton Show, admitting she pranked Emma as they took items between the sheets. She told the host: “Emma Stone was worried about me because she had to touch me intimately under the sheets. To make sure I didn’t find anything I shouldn’t find… I asked the cosmetics department if they had a sponge.”
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To convince Emma that she was touching Olivia’s real private area, she wet the sponge, which horrified her. Olivia continued: “I put a sponge in there and said, ‘It’s okay, there’s a barrier here, you’ll be okay’… It was a big wet sponge. She walked up my leg and when she got there her face turned into a painting! “It’s okay, it’s a sponge, it’s a sponge!”
During the lesbian fingering scenes in the film, Olivia tried her best not to giggle. She told The Sunday Times: “We had rehearsals for two or three weeks so we couldn’t be embarrassed in front of each other. We rolled on the floor, giggled, ate together and shared everything. We became very good friends.
“Kissing is okay because kissing Rachel Weisz is like winning the lottery. The other thing was when Emma Stone was touching us, we really had a hard time not laughing at that.”
Emma, meanwhile, was “begging” to take off her clothes, telling The Hollywood Reporter: “I was surrounded by a sheet. When we were filming and doing a few takes, I said, “Can I just be naked?” I think Sarah will have something to look at when she sees that I’m not just covered with a sheet. Olivia said, “No, don’t do that!” (…) I decided to do it. I thought, ‘This makes sense to me,'” she added.
Emma takes her film nudity to the next level in her new film Bad Things, in which she plays “horny legend” Bella, who is brought back to life by a scientist after committing suicide. Soon after her rebirth, she falls in love with a “lecherous lawyer” and embarks on a journey of “self-discovery and sexual liberation.”
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Director Yorgos Lanthimos said of the R-rated film that the sex scenes are “very important” and Emma can’t “shirk” from them. He explained: “It would be very disingenuous to tell this story about this character who is so free and so open, and then (to be) coy about the sexual aspect of it.
“That was clear from the beginning and also from the novel, the script, my discussions with Emma and how we came up with these scenes. She had to be free; there should be no judgment.”
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