Actor Jackson White has spilt the beans on how they film intimate scenes on set of one of the hottest TV shows out there today, and some advice he got during one.
The American actor is known for playing the role of the manipulative Stephen DeMarco on Hulu drama series, Tell Me Lies.
Set in 2007, the series follows college students Lucy Albright (Grace Van Patten) and DeMarco, and their twisted, complicated, toxic romance over the course of eight years.
It has all the makings of a good binge-watch, and if you haven’t heard of it before, take a look here:
Its first season hit screens in 2022, with the long awaited second season dropping in September this year, being a consistent hit with critics and currently boast a score of 75% on Rotten Tomatoes.
And as if there wasn’t enough heat to watch on screen, with all the steamy relationships, the main actors, Van Patten and White, are actually together in real-life.
The former recently sat down with no-one other than his mother, Katey Sagal, and stepdad Kurt Sutter to talk about how it is to film the hot and heavy scenes on set with his girlfriend, and the awkward feedback he once received.
White was a guest on their ‘PIE’ podcast, as the 28-year-old revealed all, detailing how it all works: “You got one sex coordinator — one intimacy coordinator — that would line up with a week. So, it would be like a sex week, and there would be sex scenes all day long.”
White and Van Patten have been together for two years (Jerod Harris/Getty Images)
He said that there would be ‘sex days’ where the intimacy coordinator would be ‘running from set to set’ as more than one sex scene would be shot at a time.
Sutter asked if it was the ‘sex coordinator’ that would teach him ‘how to do it’ for the cameras, to which the actor had a humourous response.
The 28-year-old shared: “Someone was like, ‘He’s not thrusting right.’ I was like, ‘How?’ They’re like, ‘Well, he’s kind of, it doesn’t look like he’s inside,’
“So, we have to make it so that it’s more realistic,” he shared.
White went on to describe that when he was carrying out a ‘body roll’ move in a sex scene, he was told to go for a ‘more stationary’ movement in the scene.
Apparently, showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer shared the notes with him, and while Sutter joked that he had ‘four pages of thrusting notes, the actor insisted: “We worked on it, and I … nailed it.”
The couple have shared steamy scenes with not just themselves, but others too, on screen (Hulu)
Sagal and Sutter loved the story, and were in pieces after it.
White continued to explain: “Well, when you’re doing a sex scene, you don’t want to be, like, all up in their s***,” which is a fair point.
Though White and Van Patten tried to play down their offscreen relationship, the latter revealed that they leant into it a bit more to The Hollywood Reporter this year, saying that though their relationship is ‘out there’, she thinks that ‘not too much of it’ is on show.
“I think that just treating our relationship professionally, the way we treat it in our own lives, is the best way to go about it,” she explained, after saying that she didn’t want to feed into the ‘clickbait’ nature of the show.
