Keke Palmer Details "Being All Naked" in Sex Scenes With Pete Davidson
Keke Palmer was picking up what Pete Davidson was putting down in The Pickup.
In fact, the Nope actress said the comedian made her feel so relaxed on the set of the Amazon Prime Video comedy that she had no problem filming their steamy sex scene during the first week of shooting.
"First of all, he's so sweet," she gushed to Entertainment Weekly in an interview published Aug. 6, "so it was comfortable even though we were being all naked and stuff like that."
The Disney Channel alum also saw Pete as a kindred spirit, having both "started out acting and performing as kids."
"He started doing standup at 12. I started acting at nine," she explained. "So I think being at this point in our lives, we're in our 30s, and we're working with Eddie Murphy. For us, it feels like these are the moments that we dreamed of, and so we were just really happy to be there."
That's why Keke said the pair spent most of the downtime in their sex scene fawning over their costar.
"We were just kind of like, 'Hey, this is exciting. Have you met Eddie yet? Have you met Eddie yet?'" she recalled. "And so we were just kind of being excited about that."
But for Keke, it's not hard to bond with Pete. After all, as she put it, "He's pretty well-liked in the female world."
"I don't know anybody that Pete don't have chemistry with," she quipped. "Sometimes you and people just have a vibe. You maybe don't even talk in everyday life, but when you get on set and you're working together, there's that chemistry. And I think he and I had that."
Plus, Keke said that she and Pete are "two people that don't really take ourselves seriously."
"That made it fun for us to play with," she added, "to lean into that kind of awkward romance, which I think we need more of."
For more celebrity behind-the-scenes secrets about filming a sex scene, keep reading...
"It's a very odd experience. Funny enough, when you're actually shooting it and you've got a whole crew around you, it's remarkably normal. However, the odd thing that [director David Fincher] asked us to do was rehearse this scene for two hours, alone, on an empty soundstage—just [Neil Patrick Harris] and myself," she said on Late Night With Seth Meyers. "And that is when it feels highly inappropriate. You are alone with a man who's not your husband—who also has a husband—he's in his underwear, you're in your underwear, and you're sort of dry humping on a bed. No one there's there, so then we think, 'OK, we should be professional about this. We should film this on an iPhone and see how it looks.' Then you watch this thing back and it looks like we're making some sort of super creepy home porn movie."
"It's actually kind of annoying. You're there for 12 hours; it's exhausting," he told BBC Newsbeat. "All those scenes revolve around the dialogue and physical humor is so tiring."
"I am sort of a boundary-less person, which is something I'm working on. In our house, nudity wasn't a big deal, so that was never an issue for me. It was about the crew. The sex scenes that are funny, I don't care, but the ones that are actually sexual, it's like these people are seeing me be really vulnerable," she told The New York Times. "Frank, who's holding the boom, is seeing, 'Oh, this is what Amy is like when she really means business.' In between every single take, I think I screamed, 'It's so embarrassing!'"
"The most important thing is that the other person involved feels safe and doesn't feel like you're taking advantage of them in the scene, 'cause you're revealing a lot, you're going to places where you're vulnerable, and that requires an awful lot of trust," he told Time Out Chicago. "You talk with your partner and say, 'What are you comfortable with? What are you not comfortable with?' And then you go for it. You try and throw away the safety nets and not worry where the camera's gonna be or how you're gonna look or worry about looking ugly."
"It was intense," she told E! News of filming with Ryan Guzman. "Those scenes are embarrassing. They are uncomfortable, but your job as an actress or an actor is to make it believable, and this movie in particular…hinges on if that was believable, that it was enough to make this guy go insane."
"Love scenes are extremely difficult. You're always within a millimeter of sentimentality and yuck," he told W magazine. "But sex scenes are something else. The conventional response to sex scenes is that they're horrible and not sexy and it's all so unnatural. But I've always found filming sex scenes to be quite a turn-on. I like the experience of being in a sexual position when you're not supposed to be in one."
"There must be lots of other actors who love doing sex scenes too, right? Wrong. If you interview any actor about having to do sex scenes, you always the same answer: they 'hate' doing them. I am here to tell you they are all lying. Every last one of 'em," she wrote in Why Not Me?, a collection of essays. "Obviously on-screen sex is not actual penetrative sex, but as any religious high-schooler will tell you, simulating sex can be pretty damn enjoyable as well."
"It's not awkward; it's our job," he told On Air With Ryan Seacrest of starring opposite Anne Hathaway. "That's the tough life of being an actor in the movie business nowadays. It's exhausting."
"I got really, really drunk. But then that led to more anxiety when I got home because I was like, 'What have I done? I don't know,'" she told The Hollywood Reporter of working with Chris Pratt. "And he was married. And it was going to be my first time kissing a married man, and guilt is the worst feeling in your stomach. And I knew it was my job, but I couldn't tell my stomach that. So I called my mom, and I was like, 'Will you just tell me it's OK?' It was just very vulnerable. And you don't know what's too much. You want to do it real, you want everything to be real, but then...That was the most vulnerable I've ever been."
"I just start by apologizing. I think somebody told me—and I'm not sure who the actor was; I think it was Sir Laurence Olivier who said it...I think he said something to the effect of, 'I apologize if I get aroused and I apologize if I do not get aroused.' And you have to say it with the accent if you do it," he told NBC Bay Area. "But there is sort of always this awkward state of, 'Is this OK? Is that OK?' And then in between, it's like, just, 'Let's act like nothing happened.' And then you see how good of an actor you really are."
"There's a scene in which Christian uses a flogger on Anastasia," she told TIME of working with Jamie Dornan. "Filming a sex scene is not a sensual or pleasurable environment. It's really hot—not in a steamy, sexual way. It's just sweaty and it's not very comfortable. And on top of that, my hands and legs were tied, and I was blindfolded, and I was being hit with this bizarre tool."
"In the scene, she's sitting there and I take her top off and the bra off, and she has those pasties on, but she's drawn these adorable little smiley faces on them," he said of costar Olivia Wilde during an appearance on The Tonight Show. "And I forget every line in the scene—not just from this movie but from every other movie I've done. I take my hands away and I look down at my hands and there's two frickin' smiley faces on them and I have no idea what to do. The scene is over now...And I reflexively, like an idiot, just put my hands right back on her breasts. And I think I'm doing it to cover them up, but I'm realizing now that it's a very fine line between chivalry and, you know, workplace sexual assault."
"For HBO, we have so much license to show black people loving and f--king. Why wouldn't we take advantage of that? We don't get to see black lust in a normalized and natural way that isn't hyper-sexualized," she told Cosmopolitan. "Young black people have sex. Sometimes it's good sex, sometimes it's bad sex, sometimes it's revenge sex. There's so many different facets. It's such a privilege to show that and it feels so real. The writer in me is always excited to write those scenes. The performer is like, 'Oh, s--t. Why the f--k did I write this because I got to do it?'"
"It's sweaty and uncomfortable. My paranoia is, the girl I'm doing the sex scene with will think I'm getting off on her," he told The Daily Record. "I have nightmares about that."
"I only hate them when they're contrived," she told Harper's Bazaar U.K. "On Twilight we had to do the most epic sex scene of all time. It had to be transcendent and otherworldly, inhuman, better sex than you can possibly ever imagine, and we were like, 'How do we live up to that?' It was agony. Which sucks, because I wanted it to be so good."
"I was pretty nervous for the scene," he said on Chelsea Lately of hooking up with Halston Sage's character. "I met the girl the day before and she was beautiful and very sweet, but it's awkward. You meet each other and then you're grinding—you don't even know her name, barely. You have 20 crew members who are also watching you do it. And then, of course, for me, I woke up that morning and I had a giant pimple on my ass...It sucks, right? I had to go to the makeup artist who I had also met that week and be like, 'Can we go in the other room and you'll put makeup literally on my ass?' So, that was that."
"It's hard to have a sex scene, period. It doesn't matter if it's a friend, a male, a female. You're with 100-something crew members, lighting you, re-positioning you," she told The Huffington Post. "There's no comfort whatsoever."
"I'm never wearing underpants when I do those sex scenes," he told The Evening Standard. "I'm always half naked. Sex scenes, first of all, are very easy to do, because you're usually given somebody to work with who is very beautiful and attractive, so that makes it much easier, do you know what I mean? I'm telling you, you do two days of shooting sex scenes on a film set, you'll be exhausted after it. You'll get back to your partner, you won't wanna touch them. You'll be like, 'I just wanna have a bath.'"
"If I'm in a sex scene, I want to play the sex scene. I want to say, 'This is why I'm attracted to you. It's gotten to this point. This is what my body looks like,'" she told Variety. "I saw it as an opportunity way bigger than doing good work. I saw it as an opportunity for a dark-skinned actress of 50 to be in a role that's sexualized, not sexy. There's a difference between sexualized and sexy."
"Actors become very professional and proficient about watching out for each other's light and not stepping on each other's lines. All of these things are artificial, and you have to strip that away if you're going to achieve a sense of intimacy," he told W magazine of shooting opposite Michelle Williams. "In real life sex is messy, and we wanted to get at that wonderful messiness."
"Anyone who says they're laid back about sex scenes is a fibber. It never gets any less…not traumatic, that's the wrong word…not embarrassing…it can be a bit awkward," she told Women's Health. "The choreography of sex scenes is so unsexy and un-glamourous. It's all about camera angles; you have to recreate the moment so many times. It's just timing and technical."
"You don't think of sex scenes as showing your bum to the nation," he told Men's Fitness. "It's actually acutely uncomfortable being naked in a roomful of people. The very last thing it is is sexy. The actual physicality is very uncomfortable. All you're doing is smacking your nuts against someone, and nothing is going in...[One time,] a girl had to be on top of me, she had spectacular breasts, and I hadn't rearranged my stuff into a harmless position. She's basically rubbing herself all over me and, um, it got a bit hard. I had to apologize profusely afterward. It's not great when you're in a professional acting environment and somebody gets a boner, is it? No, not acceptable."
"There isn't an option," she told Vanity Fair. "It's just like, 'This is what you need to do. Get on with it.' The sooner you do it, the sooner you can stop doing it. It's so awkward."
"I try to be sensitive to the fact that we're doing something intimate, but also keep a clear boundary. Because I'm in a very committed relationship, and I'm also cognizant that it's not my girlfriend's favorite part of my job. It's a delicate balance to strike—to be emotionally open enough to have an experience that feels honest between two people but also maintain that it's just for the film. It's not my favorite thing to do. I'm also a germophobe," he told Elle. I've been profoundly germophobic since I was a young child. I don't want to kiss anyone but my girlfriend for my whole life."
"I stopped wearing the nude patch after the first season of Girls. There's not one guy who works on that show who hasn't seen the inside of my vagina," she told The Hollywood Reporter. "I used to wear this patch, but...This patch—you glue it over your vagina. It gets sweaty and always falls off. My male co-stars, at the end of the day, don't care... I never understand when people say, 'Sex scenes are so mechanical; it doesn't feel like anything.' It feels like someone f--king you! It's confusing."
"It's brilliant. I actually went up to [cocreators David Benioff and Dan Weiss] and thanked them. I was like, 'That's a scene I've been waiting for!'" she told Elle of her Season 4 tryst with Michael Huisman's character. "Because I get a lot of crap for having done nudes scenes and sex scenes. That, in itself, is so antifeminist. Women hating on other women is just the problem. That's upsetting, so it's kind of wonderful to have a scene where I was like, 'There you go!'"
"It's always pretty awkward when you have to take off your pants in front of the crew and other actors and all that stuff. During the scene, it's fine. You don't feel uncomfortable whilst the cameras are rolling," he told E! News. "As soon as it's 'cut,' and you're standing around and you're in your underwear, chatting to the crew, that's when it's weird and uncomfortable."
"I remember lying on the floor in the bathroom...and I just wouldn't get up in-between takes," she told W of the limited series' seventh episode. "I was just lying there, sort of broken and crying, and I remember at one point [director Jean-Marc Vallée] coming over and just sort of placing a towel over me because I was just lying there in half-torn underwear and just basically on the ground with nothing on and I was just, like [gasps]."
"When we were having sex, we were drunk—boy and girl drunk," he told E! News of filming with Haley Bennett. "I thought we should have a little drink just to take the edge off. We were tipsy. We were show-tunes-singing-drunk while having fake sex. We sang Lion King."
"These are people who have no trouble taking their clothes off—in a way their bodies are their currency," she told Vogue. "But they're terrified of exposing their vulnerability—of becoming emotionally naked."
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