Betty Gilpin Says It Was 'Liberating' to Film Her 'Three Women' Period Sex Scene After Having Her Baby
Betty Gilpin’s taboo-breaking sex scene in the second episode of Three Women wasn’t just a moment of liberation for her character Lina, it was a also a transformative experience for the actress who was a new mom at the time of filming.
In episode two, Lina, a suburban mom whose childhood trauma and marriage to a husband who tells her that kissing her gives him “the heebie-jeebies” has left her disconnected from her sexual desires, finally gets the steamy sex scene she deserves. Lina is menstruating and touch-starved but hungry for intimacy as she reconnects with her high school boyfriend.
“It was one of my most favorite days on set I’ve ever had,” Gilpin told Marie Claire in a Sept 21 interview. “It was a really profound day at work. We all felt it, and it felt so sort of holy, in a way.”
“Sometimes it can feel like [when shooting] sex scenes you’re sort of treated like a bat that’s flown into the room. The second, ‘cut,’ is yelled, a woman with a tarp comes over and is like, ‘The tarp of shame!’ [and] covers you. You’re like, ‘Sorry, sorry, I did that. Sorry, I was naked.’ Everyone’s like, ‘It’s okay. It’s something we have to do for this piece. It’s over now; just don’t look, look at the ground.’ It felt so the opposite. It felt like group vulnerability in a wonderful communal way.”
Gilpin says that filming the sex scene with Austin Stowell and a prosthetic penis was a “completely new” experience that allowed her to act out a more realistic display for female sexuality, unlike other shoots in which she felt pressured to look or act a certain way.
“The existence of things like period blood and fake penises, I was like, ‘Oh, these are familiar figures to me. I can simulate real sex instead of sterile, unsexy computer sex.'”
“It was my first big part after having had a baby, and certainly my first intimacy scenes after having had a baby” recalled Gilpin, who welcomed her daughter with husband Cosmo Pfeil in 2020, a year before filming the Starz show. “Everyone’s postpartum journey is different, but I definitely felt that there were just things that were different about me physically; my skin was a mess, and my hormones were going crazy.”
The GLOW star says that Three Women was a chance to celebrate the less glossy, aesthetically-appealing aspects of sex.
“When I got to work, ‘Oh, we’re adding stretch marks in makeup. We’re adding a C-section scar. We’re purposefully lighting the scene where I’m trimming my pubic hair in such a way where my tits look worse,'” she says. “It felt like, ‘Oh, we’re all leaning into what real women feel and look like.’ It felt so creatively liberating, and I think that environment is the reason I was able to play the character as fully as I wanted.”
Before you go, click here to see the steamiest sex scenes between older women and younger men.