{"id":467956,"date":"2026-02-11T12:00:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T12:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/467956\/"},"modified":"2026-02-11T12:00:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T12:00:11","slug":"pillion-gay-sex-scenes-explained-by-alexander-skarsgard-harry-lighton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/467956\/","title":{"rendered":"Pillion Gay Sex Scenes Explained by Alexander Skarsgard, Harry Lighton"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Editor\u2019s note: The following interview contains spoilers for \u201cPillion<\/a>.\u201d]<\/p>\n

Nine months after its Cannes Film<\/a> Festival premiere, the oddly graceful and brazenly kinky queer romance \u201cPillion<\/a>\u201d is finally in mainstream U.S. theaters \u2014 in all its BDSM glory. <\/p>\n

Writer\/director Harry Lighton\u2019s A24 release stars Alexander Skarsg\u00e5rd and Harry Melling<\/a> as lovers on a dom-sub continuum, respectively, in London. It\u2019s now in select theaters with no rating from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and, in bypassing the MPA, \u201cPillion\u201d unfortunately surrenders more theaters and showtimes in order to arrive on screens intact and, well, uncut. (It already played a limited qualifying run in fall 2025 for awards consideration, and now seeks to tap into the Valentine\u2019s box office alongside the similarly sexually unhinged, R-rated \u201cWuthering Heights<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\"‘Sirat’<\/a> \"SANTA<\/a> <\/p>\n

The uninhabited, leather-clad (or not) sex scenes in \u201cPillion\u201d \u2014 chains, gags, assless chaps, singlets, and all \u2014 are striking for a mainstream theatrical release. (Currently, the film is only on four screens.) Earlier in awards season, IndieWire spoke with writer\/director Lighton, who adapts Adam Mars-Jones\u2019 book \u201cBox Hill,\u201d who assured that no cuts were made to sex scenes for the sake of a safer rating. And that no one on the studio side demanded them, either. <\/p>\n

Skarsg\u00e5rd had claimed on the festival circuit last year that the filmmakers shot \u201cway more graphic scenes.\u201d<\/a> Lighton clarified that the scene Skarsg\u00e5rd referred to was the first blow job Colin (Melling) gives Ray (Skarsg\u00e5rd) in the alleyway after their Christmas Day date. That was almost quite a bit more explicit.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t say that there were a lot more graphic scenes,\u201d Lightson said. \u201cThere was specifically one shot and it was the bell end of the cock in close-up, looking down the barrel of the lens, erect with the focus on the Prince Albert. I loved the shot, and it was in the edit for ages. It was in the first sexual encounter in the alley when we used it, and it created a laugh in the wrong moment in that scene, a laugh when you needed the audience to be holding their breath from releasing. It was taken out to try to keep the tension. I never made a decision to take something out because I thought it was graphic. I was never told to take anything out. It was also based in trying to thread that line between honesty and [sexual] jump scare.\u201d<\/p>\n

So while that scene could have been a hell of a lot steamier, the way Lighton framed said blow job, it\u2019s all about preserving the playful energy of Colin and Ray\u2019s first time.<\/p>\n

\"Pillion\"\u2018Pillion\u2019Courtesy A24<\/p>\n

Skarsg\u00e5rd is next to naked in the film \u2014 and also showed his erotic side once more in Sundance 2026\u2019s \u201cWicker\u201d<\/a> as a sexually vigorous man woven literally from wood. The actor, in conversation with Lighton about that scene and more, added, \u201cHarry never went for the shock values of those scenes. There was a version of this that could have been way more graphic, but it was important for all of us to have a balance. You don\u2019t want to shy away from it, but you don\u2019t want it to be too distracting where that becomes a thing, where it\u2019s like, \u2018Now they\u2019re doing it just to get a reaction out of the audience.\u2019 That takes you out of the narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n

That first scene, too, could have looked much different. Skarsg\u00e5rd said that while the film wasn\u2019t shot \u201cin sequence, those three pivotal moments \u2014 the first blow job, the first intercourse, the first orgasm \u2014 were shot in that order. The only one that we stopped to discuss on the day as we were shooting was the blow job. The other two kind of flowed naturally. The first one was tricky because the first time we shot it, it didn\u2019t get aggressive, but it felt like Ray was a bit more assertive and forceful, grabbing Colin. Colin was gagging a bit more. We all kind of huddled after that \u2026 it\u2019s important that it should be playful and exciting. You want to leave it the way it is in the edit now: Colin with cum on his face, smiling. \u2026 We definitely didn\u2019t want the audience to feel like, \u2018Jesus Christ, get away from that dude. That was abusive!\u2019 We had to calibrate that scene. We wanted it to be intense and to be clear that Ray\u2019s in charge \u2026 [but] we wanted it to be fumbling and weird from Colin\u2019s point of view.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPillion\u201d deserves praise for its lack of restraint \u2014 there\u2019s oral sex! anal sex! even torturously hot mental sex of the tantric sort! \u2014 and for its earnest dive into the fetish milieu of the Gay Bikers Motorcycle Club, from whom Ray hails. Where \u201cThe History of Sound\u201d took a muted approach to queer intimacy, and \u201cCall Me by Your Name\u201d panned to a tree, Lighton said none of that while pitching the movie.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always felt like I wanted to leave it in the audience\u2019s control to make their own judgment of the sex, and to me, if I am telling a story about kink, if I had pattered away from the sex scenes, that would be me casting judgment on the sex, and saying it\u2019s something scandalous that needs to be kept out of the frame,\u201d Lighton said. \u201cIt was my first instinct when I read the book and when I met with the producers, which is \u2018I don\u2019t want to tell a version of this story that is under the pressure to pan away.\u2019 I might have used that shot in \u2018Call Me by Your Name.\u2019 I had to feel like it was looking directly at that world, and the sex within that world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPillion\u201d is now in select theaters from A24.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[Editor\u2019s note: The following interview contains spoilers for \u201cPillion.\u201d] Nine months after its Cannes Film Festival premiere, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":467957,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[13162,49,48,75,1554,2977,142456],"class_list":["post-467956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-alexander-skarsgard","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-interviews","tag-pillion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467956\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/467957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}