Baring it all on-screen can be a humbling experience for most actors — but not these
stars. From an SNL alum's nude casino stroll to an actor's "big reveal" in
Forgetting Sarah Marshall, these celebs aren't afraid to let it all hang out.
Natalie Portman was 12 when she starred in Léon: The Professional,
playing a hitman's young protégée. Reflecting on that experience during a speech at the
Women's March in Los Angeles in 2018, Portman recalled feeling sexualized by the media.
"I understood very quickly, even as a 13-year-old,
that if I were to express myself sexually, I would feel unsafe."
Explaining that she decided to pass on any role that required
her to so much as kiss another actor, the actor went on to add:
"I built a reputation for basically being prudish, conservative, nerdy,
serious, in an attempt to feel that my body was safe and that my voice would be listened to."
Early on in her career, appearing nude on-screen was out of the question for
Portman — until it wasn't. In 2007, Portman appeared sans clothing in Wes
Anderson's Hotel Chevalier, a 10-minute film that appeared before The Darjeeling
Limited. While speaking about the role, Portman told The Guardian:
"I think it's beautiful and I think it's tastefully done and I love the
short. And it still wasn't like full nudity."
Clearly, Portman's views about on-screen nudity had evolved over the years. She told Elle UK:
"I'm definitely not a prude about sex or nudity,
I just don't want [to] do something that will end up as a screen grab on a porn site. So meanwhile,
I'm doing halfsies. I'm like, 'I'll show my butt but not my boobs.'"
Katherine Waterston bared it all for the 2014 film Inherent Vice.
She discussed that full-frontal nude scene in an interview with HuffPost, telling the outlet:
"When you have a lot to do in a scene,
it's actually quite liberating. I find it more freeing."
In fact, Waterston sees nudity as one of the many tools at an actor's disposal in
revealing the truth of a character when tackling a role. From her perspective,
displaying physical nudity is ultimately no different than actors allowing themselves to
become fully exposed and unguarded on an emotional level. She told the Daily News:
"I feel that nudity is sort of what we do as actors. It's all nudity,
it's all vulnerable, it's all at least a little bit scary. But it didn't feel any
more vulnerable or complicated than any other complicated, vulnerable scene I've played."
Alexandra Daddario's profile has risen in recent years thanks to her
critically-acclaimed TV roles in 2021's The White Lotus and Mayfair Witches,
two years later. Among her previous projects was the first season of True Detective,
where she played a young woman who has an affair with Woody Harrelson's character. In one episode,
Daddario went full-frontal for a nude sex scene with Harrelson. The actress
told MTV News of why she decided to get naked on-screen for the first time in her career:
"I saw it as an interesting challenge. I really wanted to be part of the show,
and I understood why the nudity and all of that was required of the character."
As Daddario told Collider, she was hesitant about going nude for the role. However,
she didn't want to pass up the opportunity to appear in a show that she suspected would be a
huge hit — and a potential game-changer for her career. She told the outlet:
"I didn't have a moral problem with it. You know, I warned my family,
but I wasn't super concerned about it."
Kristen Wiig became a standout on Saturday Night Live for her
full and total commitment to whatever character she happened to be playing.
"God, I hope somebody walks up soon so I can say, 'Welcome to Target!' I just want to say,
'Welcome to Target!'"
That commitment also extends to appearing nude when appropriate, as she demonstrated in her 2014
movie Welcome to Me. In the film, Wiig plays a woman with borderline personality disorder
who wins $86 million in a lottery. From there, the woman moves into a casino hotel and hires
a camera crew to film a self-funded TV show about her life. In the film's climactic scene,
Wiig's character suffers a breakdown that leads her to walk naked through the casino,
requiring full-frontal nudity from the actress. Wiig told the Los Angeles Times:
"I was terrified to do it, for the obvious reasons. And then after I did it, I was like,
'Oh, this is actually kind of freeing. How many people can say they were just
walking around a public place naked with a bunch of people around?'"
Unlike the majority of on-screen nude scenes,
Wiig's exposure didn't appear in a steamy sex sequence. In fact,
the nudity was entirely about demonstrating the character's vulnerability and the fragility
of her mental state in that emotionally charged moment. She told The Violet Files:
"Being naked in a film or on stage isn't always supposed to be sexy.
It was the part and it felt right, so I did it."
Over the course of her acting career, Hayley Atwell has appeared in a wide range of projects,
playing everything from a secret agent in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
to a debutante in the period drama Brideshead Revisited. In the latter,
she appeared fully nude in a steamy sex scene. Atwell told a German newspaper,
"Nude scenes can be very liberating. I feel very human. This is me,
with all my little imperfections."
As she told the Evening Standard, it was the internet, not personal modesty,
that underscored her decision to not do more nude scenes. Her fear? Eventually all of her
additional future nude scenes would wind up as a titillating compilation on YouTube.
In 2014, Jennifer Lawrence's nude selfies were infamously exposed on the internet
after her phone was hacked. Four years later, she depicted a Russian ballerina
trained to become a seductive assassin in Red Sparrow — a role that demanded a nude scene.
As Lawrence told Variety, the movie helped the actor to reclaim agency over her body:
"The insecurity and fear of being judged for getting nude ... should that dictate
decisions I make for the rest of my life? This movie changed that and I didn't even
realize how important changing that mentality was until it was done."
Lawrence credited the film's director, Francis Lawrence,
for letting her know about some of the film's more difficult scenes involving nudity and sex,
and thoroughly talking through what would be happening until she felt comfortable. However,
that's not to say she took on the challenge without hesitancy — in fact,
she was fairly terrified of the prospect. Lawrence told Australia's Today show:
"I knew that the only way to tell the story is if
I agreed to really do the scenes and go full monty."
She then added:
"But then after I finished the scene I felt empowered."
In the opening scene of the big-screen comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall,
Jason Segel's character exits the shower, only to be greeted by his girlfriend announcing
they're through. Segel's character is so shocked by the announcement that he
drops his towel and lets it all hang out. For Segel, his reasoning behind the scene
was to emphasize the character's humiliation while getting dumped. The actor told Vulture:
"I thought that was hilarious. I was actually not very uncomfortable doing it. I really felt free."
"Everything about that movie was really authentic to who I was."
As it turned out, the most sensitive aspect of the scene wasn't Segel's full-frontal nudity,
but how long the audience was exposed to it. As the film's director, Nicholas Stoller, told EW,
Segel's phallus only appears on-screen for about a second-and-a-half. This was
the result of test screenings indicating viewers didn't want to see it for any longer than that.