Darren Criss reveals Hollywood was initially even raunchier: 'There was s— I clutched my pearls at'
Considering Hollywood is about sex workers who get their start in Tinseltown by servicing studio executives and famous faces, it's unsurprising that it really goes there when it comes to sex scenes.
But it turns out the new Ryan Murphy Netflix show was initially even more over-the-top when it comes to sexual content. While joining Seth Rudetsky on his YouTube livestream Stars in the House to raise money for the Actors' Fund, the cast of Hollywood opened up about the explicit scenes.
"The initial draft of the script was very graphic," said David Corenswet, who plays actor Jack Costello. "They toned it down."
Netflix
Darren Criss, who portrays director Raymond Ainsley, added, "There's no f--ing numbers on the dial anymore for how raunchy it was. They dialed it back severely to focus more on the heart and the hope...There was s--t I clutched my pearls at."
In the end, it wasn't so much the content that changed as the way they chose to film the scenes. "The descriptions of stuff were uber-salacious," Criss said. "The vibe was super-charged sexuality. How you shoot a scene and how it's written, there's a margin of disparity. But it certainly did make the initial read-through a little terrifying."
More than the initial read-through, the cast even had fittings for prosthetics for potentially full-frontal sex scenes. Corenswet said one of his earliest phone conversations with co-star Jeremy Pope (screenwriter Archie Coleman) was over whether they might wear a prosthetic on screen. "I thought he meant face prosthetics," Corenswet admitted.
Pope clarified, adding, "Most of us said 'Yes,' then we got episodes 1 and 2." After his camera test, Pope was approached about being fitted for a prosthetic. "I was like 'Ooo, does Archie get beat up? What am I getting?'" he elaborated. "Then I started putting the pieces together of Oh, we're not talking about anything above the waist of a prosthetic."
Hollywood is now streaming on Netflix.
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