Most people know that uncomfortable feeling when a film suddenly cuts to a sex or nudity scene while you’re watching with an older relative.
At times, those moments are included because the story calls for them — even if they’re not exactly easy to sit through as a group.
And while viewers might assume it’s always carefully simulated, that isn’t universally true. Some films have featured unsimulated sex scenes, including Pink Flamingos, The Realm of Senses, Lars von Trier’s The Idiots, and the 2013 French film Stranger By The Lake, which follows Franck as he becomes infatuated with a man he meets at a nudist beach.
Still, plenty of stars prefer to avoid explicit scenes whenever they can — whether for personal comfort, family reasons, or boundaries they’ve set with directors and producers.
Below are five well-known actors who have ‘refused’ sex scenes (or pushed back on them) — along with the reasons they’ve given.
Samuel L. Jackson is celebrated for his unmistakable voice and decades of standout performances — but he’s never been eager to make nudity part of his on-screen legacy.
Even with a filmography that spans well over 150 projects, he’s made it clear that he prefers to keep intimate exposure off the table whenever possible.
That said, Jackson has acknowledged there are times when a script demands it — and he once shared a tongue-in-cheek workaround during an interview with Howard Stern. “I might ask for a d**k double,” he joked, before adding: “I don’t know if it’s formidable enough. My aura’s so big, I don’t know if my d**k is big enough to fill my aura.”
Despite his reservations, he has appeared in more romantic or intimate moments in films such as 2004’s In My Country and 2009’s Mother and Child. He’s also spoken candidly about how awkward those scenes can be for performers, saying: “You apologize for both reasons. ‘I’m sorry if I get excited’ and ‘I’m sorry if I don’t.’ Because sometimes it just ain’t happening!”
Megan Fox became a worldwide fan favourite after her role in Transformers, but she has stated she’s not interested in taking on sex scenes — particularly as a mother.
In 2018, Fox (who was pregnant with her third child at the time) said she wouldn’t accept roles involving sex scenes because of her children. Speaking to The Sun, she explained: “There are just certain things boys should never see their mothers do…”
She also described turning down an HBO opportunity where she would have played a sex worker, adding: “It has very graphic sex scenes, I don’t think my boys could handle that.”
Penn Badgley’s character has done plenty of disturbing things in Netflix’s You, but the actor himself has been open about wanting to scale back the show’s sex scenes.
While working on Season 4, Badgley said he requested fewer intimate moments, explaining that it was connected to maintaining respect within his marriage.
On his podcast, Podcrushed, he said, “Fidelity in every relationship, including my marriage, is important to me. It’s got to the point where I don’t want to do that.”
He also recognized that removing sex entirely wasn’t realistic for the series’ storyline — and later discussed how that boundary had to be reconsidered as the show continued.
“I had to throw that out the window,” the Gossip Girl actor told People, while noting it was still a serious conversation he raised with the production team.
“That was the question again. All right, what am I willing to do?” he said. “And as I always said, I said, my desire is that least as possible, but if it’s necessary, that’s the show we all sign up to make. So, let’s make sure it’s vital, let’s make sure it’s important, it’s deliberate. And we did.”
Pitch Perfect star Rebel Wilson has long maintained a firm boundary around nudity, particularly in comedy projects.
In 2016, she said she was pressured to do a full-frontal scene for The Brothers Grimsby — but she stuck to what she’d agreed to from the start.
In an interview with Marie Clare, Wilson explained: “We write in the contract, specifically, ‘No nudity.’ They got in another girl — this larger burlesque dancer from South Africa — to be a nude double. And they got her to do all this stuff.”
Sarah Jessica Parker, best known as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, is notably the only member of the central quartet who did not appear nude — thanks to a nudity clause she has maintained throughout the franchise.
That approach continued into the spin-off And Just Like That, where Parker again opted out of nude scenes.
In an appearance on Howard Stern’s SiriusXM show, she explained: “The only thing I said to [creator Darren Star] that I was concerned about was that I just didn’t feel comfortable doing nudity, and I suspected that if it wasn’t in the pilot, it would be a part of a series.”