Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/Lionel Hahn/Blue is the Warmest Colour
Topics: Film and TV, LGBTQ, World News, Celebrity, Sex and Relationships
Kit Roberts
Topics: Film and TV, LGBTQ, World News, Celebrity, Sex and Relationships
An actress has opened up about how filming a 'graphic' lesbian sex scene led to her questioning her sexuality.
Lea Seydoux is best known for her role as Dr Madeleine Swann alongside Daniel Craig in two James Bond movies, Spectre and No Time to Die.
But prior to the role in the Hollywood franchise, Seydoux took on a role in a French movie which was released in 2013.
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She starred in the movie opposite Adèle Exarchopoulos, and has previously spoken about the effect that filming it had on her.
The movie was Blue is the Warmest Colour and follows young woman Adele, played by Exarchopoulos, as she embarks on a journey of self-discovery around her sexuality.
Seydoux took on the role of Adele's first love, blue-haired bohemian artist Emma.
The relationship between the two characters is central to the film's plot, including its 'explosive' beginnings when they begin sleeping together.
Blue is the Warmest Colour is also known for an extended and graphic sex scene between the two leads.
Variety magazine described the scene as 'the most explosively graphic lesbian sex scenes in recent memory.'
And the scene was so charged that Seydoux even revealed that it had made her have questions about her own sexuality.
When asked by the Evening Standard whether she had questioned her own sexuality after the film's production, she replied: "Of course I did."
She added: "Me as a person, as a human being. It's not nothing, making those scenes."
So, what was the result of her asking these questions about herself?
She said: "Of course I question myself, but I did not have any revelations."
The film was critically acclaimed on its release, winning the Pal D'Or at Cannes in 2013.
It was also at the centre of controversy over the explicit nature and length of the sex scene, which was shot over 10 days.
Among those who criticised the scene was French author and illustrator Jul Maroh, who wrote the graphic novel that the movie is based on.
Maroh criticised the scene as 'porn' as well as the fact that neither of the two leads were played by an LGBTQ+ actress in a film, which centres lesbian identity and experience.
She criticised the sex scene for catering to a male gaze in a blog post, calling it a 'brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn.'
Maroh added: "Among the only people we didn't hear giggling were the potential guys [sic] too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen."