Patricia Arquette opened up about an uncomfortable experience she had while filming a nude scene in 1997’s Lost Highway — long before intimacy coordinators were available.
“I mean, I’ve always been very, very modest about nudity and sex and all of that,” she told Business Insider in an interview published Friday, March 7.
The Academy Award winner reflected on how she has often advocated for herself on Hollywood sets throughout her career, including an incident on the set of Lost Highway that would be entirely unacceptable today.
Arquette had a dual role in director David Lynch‘s noir thriller as trouble musician Fred Madison’s (Bill Pullman) wife, Renee Madison, and femme fatale Alice Wakefield. Lynch’s typically surreal movie plays with the duality of Arquette’s performances, including in one scene where Alice seduces auto mechanic Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty).
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It was during the sex scene that Arquette had to step in because crew members wouldn’t follow guidelines for a “closed set,” where only people pivotal to filming are allowed.
“I remember there was a scene in Lost Highway at the end where I’m naked, and Balthazar Getty and I are having this love scene outside this cabin, and then it’s going to burn down,” she noted. “And everyone kept saying, ‘OK, closed set. There’s going to be nudity,’ blah, blah, blah. ‘Walk away if we don’t need you in this part.’”
Arquette went on: “They kept saying that, and there was still a lot of people on the set. And so I had a robe on, and I was like, ‘OK, guys, I just want to say something. I’m about to take this robe off, and when I take this robe off, if I turn around and I see you there, and I know you don’t need to be here, I’m going to walk over and punch you in the f—ing face.’ And then 15 people ran away. People are jerks. That’s all I could say!”
Arquette said she was never particularly comfortable filming nudity or sex scenes, which made it “really hard” for her to portray sex worker Alabama Whitman-Worley in 1993’s Quentin Tarantino–written crime thriller True Romance.
“I do understand that sexuality plays an important, powerful position in people’s lives: in their expression of love, their expression of desire, their pursuit of power, or their desire to control someone. I mean, there’s a lot of places that sexuality, I think, is pivotal,” she said.
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The Severance actress also discussed the ways in which Hollywood has changed its on-set protocols by introducing intimacy coordinators to assist in planning scenes where actors can be most vulnerable.
“Well, I haven’t really had to do a lot of sex scenes for a long time,” she acknowledged. “But I have a bathtub scene coming up in a project I’m about to do, and so they were like, ‘Do you want an intimacy coordinator?’ And usually I would say no, but for this, even though I trust everyone, I just feel very vulnerable at this moment in my life. I feel like, yeah, I do want that. I’m really glad that they have intimacy coordinators now.”
Arquette went on: “At a certain point, I felt like I would have to step in myself. I remember The Act, there was a bath sequence with Joey King, and I was like, ‘Hey, no monitors. Turn the camera away. Who’s going to be on the set? What do we have to cover her?’”
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“Hopefully, senior people do that kind of stuff anyway for people, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have an intimacy coordinator because there’s a lot of people that are out of line, and it might not even be the director or the actor. Sometimes it’s the crew,” she added. “Why put a young person — or even not a young person, anyone — in that position? God knows a lot of people have been through enough.”
Arquette has had an esteemed career with an Oscar and two Emmy wins. She won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for 2014’s Boyhood and has received both an Outstanding Lead Actress Emmy for playing psychic profiler Allison Dubois in Medium as well as an Outstanding Supporting Actress Emmy for her portrayal of convicted killer Gypsy Rose Blanchard‘s mother Dee Dee Blanchard in The Act.
