April Pearson and Laya Lewis, who appear in the E4 show Skins, have spoken out about their experiences shooting sex scenes, revealing they did not feel secure.
Pearson Opens Up On How She Didn’t’ Felt Protected While Shooting Sex Scenes
Pearson (who played Michelle Richardson on the first generation of the teen series) and Lewis (who played Liv Malone on the third generation) both mentioned being ordered to “miss meals” despite “pressure” to lose weight in a recent interview.
“I turned 18 right at the beginning of shooting, so I only had so many more sex scenes than anyone else,” Lewis said on Pearson’s podcast Are You Michelle from Skins?
“It was a love scene on my first day. Fair enough, we’re writers, and we’re playing, but I think if you’re trying to pick kids from the street, which is basically what they were doing and get this authentic on-screen thing going on, there ought to be some assistance or, I don’t know, some talking about stuff. It was a little much to be like, “Bang, here you go, day one.”
Pearson said, “I believe there is a distinction between being legally old enough and being emotionally old enough.” “What happens on your seventeenth or eighteenth birthday that makes you so different from when you were sixteen or seventeen? I was talking to my husband about how I felt like I was too young and that I wasn’t protected.”
Laya Lewis Also Opens Up On How She Didn’t’ Felt Protected Shooting Sex Scenes
“I certainly felt a lot of anxiety to look taller or slimmer,” Lewis said of another event. From some of my own internalised material from seeing the film, as well as what you were seeing on camera at the time, which wasn’t as diverse and different as it is now.
“But often by the developers themselves or others who work behind the scenes. We were once advised that we shouldn’t eat breakfast and that we should only eat a jacket potato for dinner.
“In series six, we were all required to attend a conference, and we were essentially ordered to miss meals. I was the one who spoke up first, and I recall thinking, “We all look the same as last year.” And I recall someone asking, “Do you Laya?” ‘Do you all have the same appearance as last year?’
“There was also this moment while we were shooting – when we had to go to Morocco in the first episode of season six – and we each had to stand in a room with only us and the producer of the show, who was male and a lot older than we were at the time – and we each had to, in a bikini or our swimwear, one-by-one stand in a room with just us and the creator of the show, who was male and a lot older than we were We were all to people who were between the ages of 16 and 18. And we’d like to know if we looked decent enough to film in Morocco.
“And the customers wanted me to go first because they said, ‘You’re the most relaxed, and if you go first, it’ll convince the other girls that it’s not so bad.’ But it was a disaster. ‘You look fantastic, Laya, you look great,’ he said.
And it’s a memory I’ll never lose. I figured it was bad at the moment, but I guess it’s gotten a lot worse since then.”
Pearson said, “At the moment, you’re young and you don’t know any better.” “Is it cool that you don’t know what to think, that you don’t know how to talk up?” And, like many trauma patients, you look back on it and say, “Yeah that was messed up.”
Response To The Claims Made By Stars
“It is really worrying to hear of the remarks made,” a Channel 4 spokesperson said in response to the allegations (via Digital Spy).
We now have a discreet ‘Speak Up’ facility open for existing productions, which is prominently advertised on our production call sheets; however, we take all claims of sexual behaviour extremely seriously and urge those with complaints to come forward.”
“We’re sincerely and unambiguously sorry that any cast member was made to feel insecure or inadequately respected in their work during their tenure on Skins,” a spokeswoman for Skins co-creator Bryan Elsley said in a statement to The Sun.
“We’re dedicated to providing clean, dependable, and comfortable working environments for everybody in the television industry.”
