Rob Lowe has a hot take about sex scenes in Hollywood.
The 60-year-old actor welcomed Kristin Davis on his “Literally!” podcast last week and they discussed the lack of steamy on-screen moments in film nowadays.
“Nobody has sex scenes in movies anymore,” Lowe said.
But Lowe walked back his comment when Davis, 60, mentioned Nicole Kidman’s erotic film “Babygirl,” where Kidman, 57, plays a New York CEO who has an affair with her much younger intern.
“Oh, I’ve seen it. I take it back,” said Lowe. “It’s pretty great. It’s pretty hot. Babygirl’s great.”
Davis, who hasn’t seen “Babygirl,” said that sex scenes in movies have become “an unusual thing now.”
“They’re like, ‘Oh, it’s so brave. She’s so brave,'” Lowe said sarcastically. “She’s brave because she has a sex scene. That’s brave now. And in our day, it was required. There’s the page 73 rule. In the day, the sex scene was always on page 73.”
The “St. Elmos Fire” actor explained, “You get a script and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, how gratuitous. Do I have to be naked in this? Let me check.’ And you didn’t have to read the whole script. You just went to page 73 because of that mid–second act. Which is notoriously the toughest sledding in storytelling. ‘I know. They ‘Blue Lagoon’ it. Beach under a moonlit night.'”
Davis noted that “things have changed, and continue to change so much” in filmmaking, prompting Lowe to share that his “attitude” about the topic is to “make the most of it in disruption, is actually a great time to build new things.”
Lowe also recalled how Hollywood studios reacted to one of his risqué movies from the 1980s.
“Kim Cattrall and I did a movie called Masquerade together, which, I love that movie,” he said. “It got good reviews, but the studio kind of dumped it because they thought it was too sexy. It was pretty gratuitous, but it was great.”
Kidman, for her part, has opened up about feeling empowered from her role in “Babygirl.”
“A lot of times women are discarded at a certain period of their career as a sexual being. So it was really beautiful to be seen in this way,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in December.
“From the minute I read it, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is a voice I haven’t seen, this is a place that I haven’t been, I don’t think audiences have been,'” Kidman continued. “My character has reached a stage where she’s got all this power, but she’s not sure who she is, what she wants, what she desires, even though she seems to have it all. And I think that’s really relatable.”