This has been a banner year for the sex scene. Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal in All of Us Strangers. Barry Keoghan and a freshly dug grave in Saltburn. Cillian Murphy, Florence Pugh and the Bhagavad-Gita in Oppenheimer. Emma Stone and the rest of the cast in Poor Things. Between them, these films have pushed the boundaries of what a cinematic sex scene can be. They’ve been tender, sad, passionate, thought-provoking, gruesome and excruciating in equal measure. But try telling that to Henry Cavill.
“I don’t understand them – I’m not a fan,” Cavill recently said of sex scenes during an interview on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast. “I think there are circumstances where a sex scene actually is beneficial to a movie, rather than just the audience, but I think sometimes they’re overused these days.”
