Daily Mail

Normal People star’s pride at ‘nude equality’

- By Eleanor Sharples TV and Radio Reporter

IT’S the drama that held viewers rapt with its numerous sex scenes.

And Daisy Edgar-Jones has said she was ‘proud’ there was ‘equality in nudity’ in Normal People.

The 22-year-old actress who played Marianne Sheridan in the popular series was involved in a number of sex scenes opposite her co-star Paul Mescal, who played Connell Waldron.

The BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s best-selling novel employed intimacy coordinato­r Ita O’Brien to work with the cast on set for sex scenes.

Miss Edgar-Jones yesterday told the Edinburgh TV Festival: ‘An element I was really proud [of] that was a part of the series was the equality in nudity between Paul and I because I think that’s really important.

‘Also, if you’re trying to tell the truth of a relationsh­ip you have to also include the truth of what that means in terms of intimacy.’

Mescal, 24, added: ‘I think the idea of shooting those scenes made me far more anxious than the actual shooting process from day to day.

‘There is an awkward ten minutes where you are like “I’m going to have be relatively naked in front of a group of strangers”. But from an actor’s perspectiv­e you have to treat it in the same way as a scene where they are speaking to each other and get over your own ego and anxiety.’ Normal People tells of the on-off relationsh­ip between two Irish teenagers from different background­s and follows them as they move to university in Dublin and into adultto

hood. The series, which was made available on iPlayer in April, is credited with giving the BBC its best week for online views – 21.8million – doubling the record set following the release of the first series of Killing Eve.

 ??  ?? The nude Normal: Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones in the series
The nude Normal: Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones in the series
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