Hollywood actress Brittany Snow has shed light on an ‘unspoken rule’ within the entertainment industry regarding female actors participating in intimate scenes, following her own experience filming a revealing sequence for a new Netflix series.
The 39-year-old actress, known for her role in Hairspray, criticized the double standards faced by women in intimate scenes during an interview on the Las Culturistas podcast. She shared her experience with Malin Akerman on the popular thriller series The Hunting Wives.
The scene with the 47-year-old Watchmen actress defied traditional Hollywood norms. Snow noted that the show altered the usual expectations for nudity and young actors by incorporating the female gaze.
She stated: “Hollywood wants to kind of disregard women after the age of 32 for sex scenes, specifically nudity and things that are sort of like women coming into their own sexual, like, prowess.”
Snow emphasized that Hunting Wives challenged this bias by illustrating the evolving sexual agency of women as they age.
“I think that this was just like, ‘No, we’re going to still have this be very prevalent in a woman’s life, even after she’s of a Hollywood age,'” she expressed during the podcast.
In the new Netflix series, which attracted five million viewers in its first week, Snow portrays Sophie, a character who relocates from the big city to a small town in Texas.
There, she encounters Margo, a captivating and enigmatic socialite played by Akerman, leading to a romantic entanglement.
However, the plot quickly spirals into chaos involving obsession and murder after a teenage girl’s body is discovered in the woods.
During her conversation with Las Culturistas‘s Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, Snow explained their approach to portraying an intimate scene between mature women.
“I do think from the very beginning, there was a very clear understanding of what we were making in terms of the women that were on the show, what kind of women we were going to be — that were not 20 years old and were having these sex scenes,” she explained.
“We’re in our late 30s, 40s, and we’re going to be powerful, and this is for the woman gaze, and we’re going to go for it.
“That was never a question. We were never shy about, ‘Oh, I wonder if this is going to be too much.’”
“We knew going into it, and we signed up for that,” Snow added. “And I think that that’s something that we’re proud of.”
In another interview, Snow shared how Akerman helped create a comfortable environment during the intimate scenes, contrasting her past experiences with male co-stars.
“I’ve found a lot of men in sex scenes are really, really focused on themselves and how they look and if their abs are looking great and not necessarily thinking about your experience,” she told Self magazine.
“And with Malin, it was so collaborative in terms of like, ‘Are you OK? Do you want me to do this? Is this OK if I put my hand here?’ Just so much care was taken, which felt really nice.”