Going for a song | 12 December 2012

I once asked Donald Sutherland what it was like filming the famous naked love scene with Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now. He said, ‘It was just so horrible.’ I was telling this anecdote over a bacon sandwich to the freckled actor Eddie Redmayne, who, if he is hit by a bus tomorrow, will be remembered for the very rude sex scene he did in the telly adaptation of the novel Birdsong. He had to make love to the radiant French actress Clémence Poésy. What can that have been like?

‘The only thing I can say is: imagine if you had to do it. Her nipples had tape on while your bits are stuffed into a sock and there are 20 strangers watching you both. Then someone shouts “Action!” It’s horrendous! There’s a famous sex scene in the book we had to recreate and we had to find a way in which it wasn’t going to be utterly awkward for both of us; it involved taping a cherry-flavour Haribo to her inner thigh and I would kiss that and no further.