Nudity can be awkward in a professional setting, but sometimes it’s just part of the job. Christina Ricci found there was some discomfort with her naked scenes while filming a certain thriller movie. Her solution? Spend the whole time with no clothes on.
Ricci explained the experience to Sydney Sweeney, during a conversation as part of Variety’s Actors on Actors interviews. “Once I had to do a movie where I was naked pretty much the entire time. The thing that made me more uncomfortable was other people being uncomfortable with me being naked,” she said. “So what I did, and you probably wouldn’t be allowed to do this now — I just stayed naked.”
Ricci took the ‘it’s only awkward if you make it awkward’ approach, normalising through forced exposure. “I was like, ‘Don’t make me feel weird, like I’m the person who has to be ashamed’. I would talk to crew members naked,” she states. The film in question was Black Snake Moan, a 2007 drama movie where Ricci plays a sex addict held captive by Lazarus Redd, a religious blues player portrayed by Samuel L Jackson.
Whether such practice would be accepted now is probably down to the climate on-set and the filmmakers involved. However, Ricci does have a point with the shame element – the human body is just that, and nobody should be ashamed of theirs, least of all when it’s part of the job everyone’s there to do.
In this interview, Ricci was primarily discussing Yellowjackets, the breakout TV series where she plays the unpredictable Misty. Sweeney, on the other hand, is promoting Euphoria, another hit drama series from HBO about a group of teens navigating drug addition.
If you’d like to read more on either, check out our guides to Yellowjackets season 2 and Euphoria season 3.