At the
Television Critics Association (TCA) Press Tour, actor Michael Sheen and
producers Michelle Ashford and Sarah Timberman talked about Showtime’s upcoming
series, Masters of Sex, in specific about setting the right tone and managing the
sex scenes on set.
Question: Is this one of the most challenging projects
you’ve ever taken on?
SARAH
TIMBERMAN: Michelle established a rule
among all of the writers, which is that there is never intended to be a
gratuitous sex scene. That would be
utterly beside the point. It was to tell
a story through sex scenes. We never
want to feel that the show just stops cold, so that people can have sex
scenes. Every scene that deals with sex
is dealing with a very complex set of relationships and these characters
emotions.
MICHELLE
ASHFORD: One of the rules was that the
story always has to be pulling through the sex scene, in some form. It has to be about something that is bigger
than just, “We are watching people have sex.”
It’s very dicey material, so we impose our own code. I’m very oddly prudish about what I’m
watching on screen, so it’s been a curious mix to be writing a show about sex,
when you don’t really want to look at a lot of graphic sex. It’s been challenging, but very interesting,
actually.
How
much did you have to invent to give this show a dramatic backbone, and how much
was already present, on the record?
ASHFORD: Well, thankfully, very little. Their story is fascinating and we had a
biography to work from, with Thomas Maier’s book, so we’ve stuck to the facts
very carefully. Certainly, with the
research, we’ve fudged none of that.
We’ve established some characters, but their lives were so complicated
and interesting that we’ve actually had to establish very little.
TIMBERMAN: And beyond the book, Tom had spent 10,000
hours of interview time with Virginia Johnson, so he’s been an incredible
resource to us.
Michael,
are you struck by just how prudish Americans were, during the time period?
MICHAEL
SHEEN: In terms of how prudish Americans
were in the ‘40s and ‘50s, I have absolutely no idea. I do know about the character that I
play. And I don’t think it’s about being
prudish. I think it’s about trying to
balance a sense of control in this man’s life.
He’s a mystery to himself, really.
He has so many locked rooms inside himself that he has to tread, very
carefully, and make sure that he tries to control his environment, so
much. I think that creates what you
might call prudishness, but is actually a lock-down desire to keep control. I don’t think that’s necessarily typical of
everyone in the society, at that time.
But obviously, things have changed in many ways since the ‘50s, when the
show is started, in terms of sexuality, and how much access we have to images
of it and information about it. But, the
same problems always apply. It doesn’t
matter whether we know a lot more about sex now or if there’s a lot more access
to it. The same problems of intimacy, of
dealing with other people, of connecting and being vulnerable with other
people, which is what the show is ultimately about, still applies now, I think.
What
are the challenges of setting the right tone and understanding that this is a
period where there was a lot of experimentation going on, while viewing it
through the prism of 2013?
SHEEN: Well, I think tone is very important with
this show because there are certain elements or certain aspects to the show
that may be reminiscent of other shows.
But, it really is a very new kind of show, in terms of the subject
matter and the way it’s being dealt with, and the fact that it’s about real
people and real events. It has to be
absolutely believable. It’s also going
between images and scenes with nudity and sexuality that would be seen, in
conventional terms, as kind of sexually exciting. It’s up against things that are much more
medical and gynecological, and notoriously we, as a culture and a society, have
some issues with that kind of thing. And
so, in terms of setting the right tone and finding a way of presenting all of
these things, that creates a cohesive whole and doesn’t alienate the audience,
is tough. That’s a challenge. And I think the tone of a lot of shows is
discovered through experimentation and actually making it. Eventually, it starts to cohere. So, I don’t think it’s necessarily something
that any show gets absolutely bang-on, from the beginning. You find your way with the chemistry that’s
there already. The humor has to come out
as very believable, centered, bedded, real situations and characters bouncing off
each other.
We
know that William Masters and Virginia Johnson eventually get married. How do you envision exploring that? Is that going to play out very slowly?
ASHFORD: Yes, I think it will play out slowly. They were married for two decades. They were together for a decade before
that. And then, they were together after
they divorced. So, if we have a long
life here, hopefully, we will play it out very slowly. There’s a lot of material there.
How
deep are you going to be getting into William Masters’ need for control?
ASHFORD: That is very, very far down the road. That was one of their later books, and it was
a bit of a mis-step. It was a
complicated story, though, why they came down that way and proposed gay
conversion. It’s a fascinating
story. If all goes well, we’ll get to
tell it. But, we actually start the
exploration of what it means to be gay in the ‘50s in this season, and that
will reverberate seasons down the road, if we get there. It’s just a much later story. It happened much later in their career.
With
so many sex scenes in this show, how do you handle that with the actors that
are coming in and out of the episodes?
SHEEN: When you’re working on something where
there’s usually one sex scene in the film, it all gets a little bit of a gray
area and people get a bit uncomfortable and awkward. You just get through it. But, it became very clear on this that that
can’t happen. There can’t be any gray
areas on this because there are actors and actresses coming in for a day or a
couple of days, as well as people who are there regularly. And when you do come into a show and you’re
not there as a regular cast member, you feel a pressure to fit in. You don’t want to hold things up. You don’t want to get things wrong. So, if they’re coming in and having to do
scenes that involve nudity or sexuality, in some way, the utmost important
thing is that everyone feels comfortable and safe. If there’s any gray area, that’s going to be
a problem. We knew, very early on, that
we had to be very, very clear that directors need to speak to actors and
actresses and be very clear about what is expected, and find out whether
they’re comfortable with that. Wardrobe
has to be in place. There have to be
checks. Nothing can be left until the
last minute, so that everyone knows exactly where they are. Everyone is comfortable and everyone feels
safe because we want people to be able to keep coming into this show and taking
those risks. There are a lot of risks in
this show, not just nudity, but emotional risks. We want the best actors to feel comfortable
about coming in and exploring this subject matter with us. And in Season 1, I feel like we’ve done that.
Has
doing this made you more open about sex, in your own lives?
TIMBERMAN: It’s definitely been an interesting thing to
see the degree to which people are surprised by the frank discussion of
sexuality in the show more than the portrayal of sex itself, and that’s utterly
relevant, today. In a way, it’s very
much like it was in 1957. Things people
talk about in the show generally aren’t talked about, so it shines a light on
our culture and our ways of communicating, as human beings. It’s made for a lot of interesting writers’
room conversations.
SHEEN: I think for me and Lizzy [Caplan], more than
anyone else, after seeing so many people so naked, doing such bizarre things in
front of you, you inevitably just get used to it. I never thought I would get used to having a
naked woman in front of me, masturbating with a glass dildo, to the point where
I would almost not notice that they were there doing it anymore, and that the conversation
about dinner that night would be more interesting, but I actually broke that
barrier in this show. Having said that,
what I think we found, in doing the show, and in life, generally, is that the
more you try to separate sex from everything else, it’s impossible. You can’t.
The act of observation affects the actual experiment, and we see that in
this. My experience of working on this
show, even though there is so much about sex and sexuality, and we find out a
lot of facts and statistics that are very interesting, in their own right, I
found that I started talking about relationships more, and the emotions, the
difficulties and the challenges. So, I
became far more open about that, which I think is probably an indication with
the show itself. The more you think that
you are watching a show about sex, the more you ultimately are watching a show
about the challenges of just connecting with human beings and being intimate.
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