Murphy: ‘Ruffalo, Bomer terrified of Normal Heart sex scenes’

Ryan Murphy has revealed that Mark Ruffalo and Matt Bomer were “terrified” of their sex scenes in The Normal Heart.

The director of the forthcoming HBO film recalled that he brought in a sex choreographer to help the actors with the tricky scenes.

Speaking to The Huffington Post, he said: “So we hired a guy who specialises in – who’s a former choreographer on Broadway – who now specialized in sex choreography.

“So he would come and he would work with the actors and it was like, ‘Okay, then you move your leg here, and your asshole goes up here, and then your neck goes over here.’ So we worked on it, so the actors felt like, ‘Okay, I’m in A Chorus Line. I can do it.’”

Ruffalo had never kissed a guy on camera before, and Bomer hadn’t filmed such sexual scenes before, but Murphy said that it was best that he “thew them into it”.

“Mark, I believe, had never kissed a guy, ever, on camera,” he said. “And he had certainly never had that level of sexuality. And I don’t think Matt had either. So I had a gay actor [Bomer] and a straight actor. And they were both terrified. But I just threw them into it.

“And the first day of shooting was the scene in the movie where Mark has to walk out of a sauna where two guys are going at it and walk by Matt, and sort of ignore him, and Matt looks on lasciviously.

“We shot that almost as an homage to the bathhouse ads they used to run in New York in the early ’80s on The Robin Byrd Show. Remember those? Those were the days. So we just got into it, man. We just got into it. And they were nervous but they were game.

He added: “They knew it was an important part of the story. They went for it.”

The Normal Heart – which is set in New York City in the early 1980s at the onset of the HIV-AIDS epidemic – will premiere on HBO on Sunday (May 25). It will air on Sky Atlantic in the UK at a later date.

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