Sex scenes with wife challenged Dafoe

By Dan Williams

HAIFA, Israel (Reuters) – He drew charges of blasphemy for
playing a crucified Jesus who dreams of making love to Mary
Magdalene in “The Last Temptation of Christ.” He had hot wax
poured over his naked body by Madonna in the murder mystery
“Body of Evidence.”

But for actor Willem Dafoe, perhaps the toughest sex scenes
yet were in a new film co-starring and directed by his wife.

“The aesthetic is not that we’re taking a hand-held camera
and we’re just letting it roll and doing our thing,” Dafoe said
at an Israeli film festival where he and Giada Colagrande
promoted their independent feature “Before It Had a Name.”

“The truth is that something as simple as, you know,
kissing someone off-screen — if you really kiss them
(on-screen) … you’re going to see spit and mushed faces and
all that thing,” he told Reuters on Wednesday in an interview.

“Unless it’s a down-and-dirty little film … you have to
strike that balance between having it rooted and having the
people not fall out of it,” said Dafoe, 50.

Set in an upstate New York mansion sheathed in black
rubber, “Before It Had a Name” is a psychological thriller that
features graphic couplings between the characters Dafoe and
Colagrande play, including one during which the latter
menstruates.

Italian-born Colagrande, 30, agreed that simulating sex
on-camera was a self-conscious act — even with one’s spouse.

“Whenever there is nudity or, even more, a sex scene, the
crew and everyone else in the film with you tends to get
embarrassed,” she said. “When they get embarrassed, you pay
more attention to whatever you do.”

Entertainment journal Variety excoriated “Before It Had a
Name” as “a wannabe haunted house tale laced with silly sex
scenes.”

But Dafoe, whose turn with Madonna was named among the “Ten
Most Embarrassing Movie Sex Scenes” by Empire magazine last
month, remained undaunted.

“When people look at movies and excise those scenes as not
being part of the fabric of the movie, that’s a little
incorrect because in this, hopefully, they are just part of the
weave and part of the storytelling,” he said.

“When people get intimate and take off their clothes, the
stakes get a little higher and the story moves a little
faster.”