‘My first day was a sex scene’: the disturbing history of teen actors and nudity
Spoiler alert: Romeo and Juliet does not have a happy ending. But Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of the Shakespeare play did – at least until recently. The 1968 movie was a huge commercial success and became a secondary school fixture. Its stars, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, even briefly dated – a dream come true publicity-wise. But now it has emerged that the pair are suing the studio, Paramount, for $500m over Zeffirelli’s handling of a scene in which both actors, then 16 and 17, briefly appeared partially naked. According to the complaint, the actors “were told by Mr Zeffirelli that they must act in the nude or the picture will fail”.
As with the music industry, cinema has tended to gloss over such incidents with the “It was a different time” excuse. This could be seen as a concerted effort to keep the lid on what many suspect to be quite a can of worms. Hussey and Whiting’s lawsuit could represent the long-dreaded canopener.
The movie industry, especially its output in the late 20th century, is now up for reappraisal, and maybe it needs it. What, for example, should we make of Jodie Foster, at the age of 12, portraying a girl forced into sex work in Taxi Driver? Or Jenny Agutter’s naked swim in 1971’s Walkabout, when she was just 16? The scene was filmed with Agutter’s knowledge and consent, and neither Foster nor Agutter has expressed regret or resentment about these roles, but at what age should an actor be considered mature enough to have given that consent? And should they be allowed to change their minds at a later date?
Or how about Nastassja Kinski? When she was 13, German auteur Wim Wenders cast her in 1975’s Wrong Move, in which she appears topless in a sexualised situation (as an adult, Kinski worked with Wenders again in Paris, Texas and Faraway, So Close). Aged 14, she was depicted fully nude in Hammer horror To the Devil a Daughter, co-starring Christopher Lee. At 17, she was in the sex comedy Stay As You Are, in which she played the regularly naked teen lover of Marcello Mastroianni, who was then in his mid-50s (Lolita-style “forbidden” romances seem to come with this territory). In 1997, Kinski said: “If I had had somebody to protect me or if I had felt more secure about myself, I would not have accepted certain things. Nudity things. And inside it was just tearing me apart.”
Trawling through the detritus of European cinema from the 1970s and 80s, there are scores of rightfully forgotten but disturbingly exploitative films, some of which appear to have blurred the lines between “erotic drama” and child sexual abuse. Many are still in circulation. Some people have contrasted liberal-minded European cinema with prudish Hollywood – including Olivia Hussey. “In Europe,” she told Variety in 2018, looking back on Romeo and Juliet, “a lot of the films had nudity. Nobody really thought much of it.”
But, like the “It was a different time” argument, the “This was Europe” line doesn’t hold a lot of water, not least because US cinema was also using young actors in sexually suggestive content. Brooke Shields was photographed naked for Playboy-owned Sugar and Spice magazine when she was 10. In 1980, aged 14, she starred in a controversially sexual ad campaign for Calvin Klein jeans (“You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing”).
In between came her breakout movie: Pretty Baby, in which she played the 12-year-old daughter of a sex worker in a 1917 New Orleans bordello. The director was Louis Malle, admittedly European, but the story was initiated and co-written by Polly Platt, an American. Platt was inspired by the work of EJ Bellocq, a photographer who portrayed the red-light district of New Orleans, but also by the exploitative 1970s film industry. Shields’s character has a sexual relationship with Bellocq (played by Keith Carradine) and poses for him naked.
Some, such as US TV host Rona Barrett, branded the film “child pornography”. Others judged Shields to be “mature beyond her years”, almost as a justification. “The direct gaze is full of ambivalent sexuality,” People magazine wrote of her in a 1978 profile. Shields has never directly accused others of exploiting her as a minor. She has said she was “protected in my naivety” during the Calvin Klein controversy. And in 2021 she told the Guardian she “wasn’t personally scathed” by Pretty Baby, adding: “I just don’t know if you could make that movie today. I guess you’d have to have an actress who was older, playing younger.”
Pretty Baby also raised issues of censorship. In the UK, the film’s release coincided with the passing of the 1978 Protection of Children Act, which criminalised the manufacture and distribution of “indecent” images of children under 16. The British Board of Film Censors cut two scenes in which Shields was fully nude (Malle initially resisted). When it was released on VHS in 1987, however, the film was reclassified as requiring no cuts.
After Pretty Baby, 14-year-old Shields starred in The Blue Lagoon, as a teen cast away on a desert island with Christopher Atkins, then 18. The film was full of nudity and sex, though the production used a 32-year-old body double for Shields, which raises its own questions. As does the film’s boxoffice success, which preceded a deluge of similarly questionable movies seemingly intent on getting away with as much teenage nudity as they could. These included Bolero, Blame It on Rio and Paradise, a Blue Lagoon knock-off in which Phoebe Cates performed her own nude scenes, aged 17. “In this business,” Cates told People magazine at the time, “if a girl wants a career, she has to be willing to strip. If you’ve got a good bod, then why not show it?” Cates has not said she felt exploited making Paradise, though she was angry with the film-makers, who, she has claimed, inserted extra nude scenes without her consent using a body double.
Perhaps the most extreme precedent for Hussey and Whiting’s legal action was French actor Eva Ionesco, whose mother Irina photographed her, and allowed others to do so, in naked and sexualised situations starting at the age of five. Before turning 13, Ionesco was depicted naked in
Italian Playboy and on the cover of German magazine Der Spiegel, not to mention in several European movies. After a series of lawsuits, French courts ordered Irina Ionesco to pay her daughter over €80,000 in damages, to destroy or hand over negatives, and to refrain from “exhibiting, selling or transmitting” images of Eva without her consent.
Whiting and Hussey’s Romeo and Juliet complaint seems considerably milder. In the contentious scene, Whiting’s buttocks are visible and, for a split second, Hussey’s chest is exposed. As Zeffirelli’s son, Pippo, pointed out, the actors have often spoken favourably about their experiences making the film. In 2018, Hussey said: “Everyone thinks: ‘They were so young they probably didn’t realise what they were doing.’ But we were very aware.”
As we have seen, many actors involved in such cases have said similar – but that does not necessarily invalidate their claims, according to Jonathan Wheeler, a lawyer specialising in child abuse cases: “If someone has been abused, and even went on the record and said, ‘I didn’t feel I was at the time’, or ‘I thought we had a great experience on set’, and then later say they think they were exploited, that might not be a problem.”
The tendency today is to be more open and honest about teen sexuality, as seen in such shows as HBO’s Euphoria and Netflix’s Sex Education. But largely as a result of #MeToo and the Harvey Weinstein scandal, protections for young actors are more robust today. Those playing teenagers are almost always over 18 and often have nonudity clauses in their contracts. The introduction of on-set intimacy coordinators has also helped.
The contested Romeo and Juliet scene would probably be done very differently today, says leading intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien, who worked on Sex Education. “It would have been mapped out and planned,” says O’Brien. “So when you get to it, there’s going to be zero surprises because you’ve rehearsed it.” Communication and consent are essential, with parents and guardians as well as actors and filmmakers, and actual nudity is now regarded as rarely necessary. “For example, if it’s not suitable for someone to be naked, get them wearing a leotard and tights, get them behind a screen and have a light behind them, all done in silhouette.”
Yet the impulse to sail close to the wind has never really gone away. More worms may yet emerge from this can. Actors from Channel 4’s provocative teen series Skins, for example, are now questioning how they were put in exposing and sexual situations. “Were any of us actually old enough?” asked ex-cast member April Pearson on her podcast in 2021. “There’s a difference between being officially old enough and mentally old enough.”
Her Skins co-star Laya Lewis agreed: “It was all a bit too much for me.” Lewis spoke of “all the insecurities that came with that”, mentioning body image problems and adding: “My first day was a sex scene.” Kaya Scodelario, who was 14 when she started on Skins, recently posted this on TikTok: “Safeguarding wasn’t really a thing back then.” A representative for Skins creator Bryan Elsley said in a statement: “We’re deeply and unambiguously sorry that any cast member was made to feel uncomfortable or inadequately respected in their work during their time on Skins. We’re committed to continually evolving safe, trustworthy and enjoyable working conditions for everyone who works in the TV industry.”
Many of the young actors in Euphoria have voiced similar concerns about the show’s levels of nudity. Sydney Sweeney, for example, said she had asked for less nudity in certain scenes – and showrunner Sam Levinson obliged. “When I didn’t want to do [a nude scene],” she said, “he didn’t make me.” In the internet era, actors are all too aware that any onscreen nudity will likely end up online for ever.
However the Hussey/Whiting case turns out, Zeffirelli’s alleged assertion that a Romeo and Juliet film would fail if its actors did not appear naked appears to have been incorrect. Many have managed adaptations without crossing the lines – not least Baz Luhrmann, whose 1996 Leonardo DiCaprio/ Clare Danes version has all but superseded Zeffirelli’s as the freshest take.
It somehow feels apt that this issue has been raised by Shakespeare’s story, one of the most enduring accounts of young love and sexuality in the whole of culture. The conundrum modern film-makers face is arguably the same one the playwright faced: how to address such issues within the societal codes of their age. It’s safe to say Shakespeare cracked it. Five hundred years on, other attempts seem to be ageing very badly.