NEED TO KNOW
Bobby Cannavale says Jamie Lee Curtis brought infectious energy to the Scarpetta set and made filming intimate scenes comfortable and fun
Cannavale shares scenes with Nicole Kidman in a truck where deep secrets unfold, calling them some of the best written
His real-life son Jake plays his younger character in flashbacks
Bobby Cannavale is opening up about those Scarpetta sex scenes with Jamie Lee Curtis.
In the new Prime Video series, the two actors play husband-and-wife duo Pete Marino and Dorothy Scarpetta, whom Cannavale, 55, describes as having a “really active, physical sex life.”
“That was just really fun to shoot,” Cannavale tells PEOPLE. “Jamie is so in the room when she’s in the room. She’s in the room when she’s not in the room, you know what I mean?”
While Cannavale says sex scenes “are not easy to do” and “very awkward usually” because “there’s all these people around” watching, Curtis, 67, quickly put him at ease.
“Jamie Lee makes everybody in the room feel like an artist, like we’re all making this thing,” he says. “She is just such a life force, and the enthusiasm and the positive nature that she brings to everything is infectious.”
Jamie Lee Curtis in ‘Scarpetta’
Credit: Connie Chornuk / Prime
Cannavale says he also had a blast filming the scenes in the truck with Nicole Kidman, who plays Dorothy’s sister, Dr. Kay Scarpetta.
“Most of the time Nicole and I had scenes together, they were in that truck,” he says. “I knew that those scenes would be really rich because in some ways, those are the best-written scenes because it’s like a code of silence, that truck. That’s where these deep, dark secrets start to reveal themselves. They dance around it and they attack it head on in some cases, but it’s always charged when we’re in the truck. There was so much good stuff for me to play with.”
Based on Patricia Cornwell’s book series, Scarpetta kicks off with a bang as Dr. Scarpetta is called to the scene of a murder that looks eerily similar to a string of killings she encountered 25 years earlier.
The eight-episode series flashes back and forth between the past and the present as Dr. Scarpetta attempts to track down the killer while simultaneously reconciling with her past.
Cannavale’s son Jake, 30, plays the younger version of his character in flashbacks, and he says he couldn’t be more “proud.” (Cannavale shares Jake with ex Jenny Lumet, and he also has sons Rocco, 10, and Rafael, 8, with partner Rose Byrne.)
“I’m really grateful for the opportunity to get to spend this much time with him,” Cannavale says. “Jake has earned his way up here to this level now. He’s just been putting that work together over the years, and of course I’m proud of him.”
“Really, what I like to talk to him about is the process of unfolding a character in this genre,” he adds. “You want to tease it out. You don’t want to show everything early. I think that’s what keeps it interesting. It’s not like a play where we have a beginning, a middle and an end, or even a movie. It’s like a slow burn. So we would talk a lot about that. I like having those conversations with him.”
Bobby Cannavale and Ariana DeBose in ‘Scarpetta’
Credit: Amazon MGM Studios
Cannavale says he initially got the pitch to join the cast from Curtis.
“She texted me and she talked about the books to me and she made it sound really enticing,” he says. “Then I read [the] script, and I was just hooked. I thought the combination of those really rich, well-drawn characters with the conceit of putting them into two timeframes like that, I thought was really, really clever.”
Scarpetta is streaming now on Prime Video.
Read the original article on People