- Pillion stars Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling didn’t get a chance to bond before filming, since the Northman star arrived a week into production.
- On their first day together, they rehearsed complex wrestling choreography that led into a sex scene.
- In the film, Skarsgård plays a member of a gay biker gang who enters into a BDSM relationship with Melling’s character, who has no experience in that world.
Like their characters, who have sex in an alley on their first date, Pillion stars Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling didn’t spend much quality time together before taking their clothes off.
Asked how they bonded before playing BDSM lovers in the surprisingly sweet erotic dramedy, Skarsgård tells Entertainment Weekly, “We didn’t have time. I was shooting something else in Toronto, so I came in a week into production.”
He arrived just in time to rehearse a complicated sex scene, in which his character, motorcycle gang member Ray, and Melling’s Colin don matching wrestling singlets (Colin’s with a cut-out rear-end) and square up on a wrestling mat. After dominating the much smaller Colin in a number of amusing positions, Ray and his “sub” have sex on the mat.
Chris Harris
“The only thing we really had to rehearse was the wrestling scene because obviously there were all these moves,” Skarsgård explains, adding with a laugh, “So that was the very first time Harry and I met, basically on the wrestling mat two days before we started shooting.”
The scene had to be carefully planned because it was shot in a single take, or in filmmaking jargon, a “oner.” “I think it was almost 10 minutes long, so it was very choreographed,” Skarsgård continues. “We had like 10 or 15 moves in it. I think in the edit, Harry felt like, all right, this is quite delicious and fun, but maybe 10 minutes is a bit too long to stay on the wrestling, and he chopped it up.”
“It was a tiring day,” Melling adds, joining his costar for the interview.
“And then to have sex on top of that,” Skarsgård jokes. “The main event right after. That’s what we call foreplay.”
Harry Lighton, who makes his feature directorial debut with Pillion, remembers rehearsing the scene with stunt performers before his actors arrived. “Seeing these two professional wrestlers do it, I was like, ‘My God, this is intense. How are the actors ever gonna do it?'” he tells EW in a separate interview. “And then I came back like an hour later, and both of them pretty much picked it all up. So that was a case of me being like, Jesus, these guys are good.”
Despite all the work that went into choreographing the scene, Lighton says some of his favorite moments were improvised. “I think a lot of the fun which emerged from the scene, a lot of the playfulness between Colin and Ray, the way Colin’s groaning as he tries to lift Ray up, and Ray’s [mocking him], kind of negging him, I think that was all sort of improvised stuff, which we discovered in the moment.”
Still, Melling credits the production’s intimacy coordinator with helping to ensure the sex portion of the scene ran smoothly. “We had this great guy called Robbie Taylor Hunt, who was fantastic,” he says. “He very much helped us choreograph the intimate stuff, and also just protected the narrative beats, making sure that we were very clear in what we were achieving in each moment.”
Courtesy of A24
While the film features its share of eroticism, Pillion is unexpectedly tender and lighthearted for a film about a kinky biker gang. That unique tone is part of what drew both actors to the project.
“When you hear ‘gay BDSM movie,’ there’s certain things that come to mind that you think it’s gonna be, you think it’s gonna be kind of dark and all that stuff,” Melling says. “And the fact that it wasn’t took us all by surprise, because my agent read it at the same time that I was reading it. And this is, tonally, such a surprising film, which for us made it even more exciting.”
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“First of all, it was a good title that made me curious,” Skarsgård says of what drew him to the script. “And then reading the log line about this coming-of-age story about a guy who is like swept off his feet by a biker in a gay gang, it felt quite unique. It felt like something I hadn’t read before, so that quite excited me.”
Calling it “one of the best scripts” he’s read, the True Blood star adds, “I was also surprised ’cause, like, three pages in, I was like giggling and I was moved, and it was sweet, and it was tender. It wasn’t the sub-dom BDSM tone that I expected. It had intense moments, but there was so much more to it.”
Pillion rides into theaters on Friday.