Actor Franz Rogowski recently opened up about how he and his openly gay co-star Ben Whitshaw created “real intimacy” on the set of the new queer romance Passages.
In Ira Sachs’ sexy new film, Rogowski plays Tomas, whose long-term marriage to Martin (Whitshaw) is challenged when he has an affair with a woman played by Blue is the Warmest Color’s Adèle Exarchopoulos.
Although it was a Sundance darling, the film was slapped with an NC-17 rating last month likely because of the prolonged sex scenes and potentially for the queer content as well, although the Motion Picture Association denies this.
Speaking out against the controversial rating, Sachs told the Los Angeles Times that removing the “sexual experiences” from the film “would be to create a very different movie.”
The writer-director went on to say, “It’s really about a form of cultural censorship that is quite dangerous, particularly in a culture which is already battling, in such extreme ways, the possibility of LGBTQ+ imagery to exist.”
In order to create the sex scenes that potentially landed the film on the wrong side of the MPA, Rogowski told GQ in an Aug. 28 interview that he and Whitshaw worked to make those moments as authentic as possible without the help of an intimacy coach.
“We had no intimacy coach; we created the intimacy ourselves. We didn't really know how it would work, so we were all nervous,” he told the outlet. “We met, we walked it through. We knew that we would just have to jump right into it, and have sex. And I mean, it wasn't real sex, but we created real intimacy: we were sweating, we were touching each other, rubbing our bodies together, you know, grabbing each others' a**. I think it helped that we just trusted each other.”
Courtesy of MUBI
The actor explained that some of the realism of the scenes came from doing longer takes than is normal, “I think a lot of it had to do with the duration, these very long takes. Sometimes you shoot for like twenty seconds; we shot these scenes for five minutes, ten minutes. So it really felt like sex.”
The connection between the two male leads is palpable onscreen and Rogowski credits the actors’ comfort with each other for the success of those scenes.
“I think we felt a strong connection from the start,” he said. “I love Ben, he’s wonderful as an artist, but also as a person, as an actor. I wanted to be with him. I think he felt the same way.”
