Why Alexander Skarsgård Was Excited Shooting Pillion’s Explicit Sex Scenes

ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke with Pillion directior Harry Lighton and stars Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling about A24’s BDSM romance movie. Lighton went into the film’s sense of humor, while Skarsgård discussed the film’s sex scenes and Melling discussed the original novel. Pillion is out now in limited theaters and will expand throughout the month.

“A timid man is swept off his feet when an enigmatic, impossibly handsome biker takes him on as his submissive,” says the official synopsis.

Tyler Treese: Alexander, the sex scenes make headlines because people aren’t used to seeing BDSM relationships depicted often, but what really stood out to me during them was how character-focused they are. We get so many character moments out of these scenes. How important was it that these scenes weren’t just provocative, but they also inform who Ray and Colin are?

Alexander Skarsgård: I think that’s a great point. That excited me about the story and about those scenes, the fact that they’re explicit, but they also propel the story forward. You learn a lot about Ray and even more about Colin in those scenes. They’re again pivotal moments in Colin’s development. So, that’s why I was genuinely excited about shooting them. They didn’t feel like Harry [Lighton] put them in the movie to just like, get attention or to kind of shock or be provocative.

I think also in terms of the amount of nudity, how graphic they are, I think Harry really calibrated in a terrific way where you don’t shy away from it. It’s there, it’s in your face, but it’s also not there to just to shock. It propels the story forward and they serve a purpose and you kind of always want, whether it’s a sex scene or not, you want to know why the scene is in the movie. You wanna know what purpose it serves, why it is there, and there was no lack of that in any of them.

Harry Lighton, what surprised me about the movie was just how funny it was. There’s a great sense of humor to Pillion. How was it finding humor in these situations, but not just making kink the joke?

Harry Lighton: Yeah, thanks. I mean, that was definitely kind of my preoccupation with the comedy tone in it was that we wouldn’t be just kind of taking the piss out of the subculture or the kinks within. But I think that what comedy can do really well is invite people into a character’s life, particularly one which they’re not familiar with. So it was a way in my mind of kind of being generous to an audience and trying to give them something which would make the unfamiliar a bit more familiar.

Harry Melling, this is based on the novel Box Hill. There’s a lot of differences and I feel like Colin gets a more optimistic ending here, but that book is written in the first person and gives such a great guide to what Colin is feeling throughout. Were you able to use the novel as a tool to inform your performance?

Harry Melling: Yeah, I read it quite early on in the process of sort of trying to work out who Colin was. You’re right, it’s written in the first person, which is obviously very useful for the person playing Colin. So it was a really interesting sort of initial access point for the story and who Colin was. Having said that, I do think that with the script there’s differences from the original source material Box Hill and what Harry wrote. Those differences were also very intriguing in terms of certainly the tone of it, like we spoke about trying to find humor alongside the more sort of shocking elements of the story. Like Harry said, feeling familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. So, yeah, it was a wonderful starting point, but I didn’t hold onto it too tightly through the making of it. I sort of used it as a springboard into making into creating my Colin.

Harry, Alex previously mentioned that this is pretty much the “family-friendly” version of the film. Is it possible for any other cuts to be released down the line, or do you think that showing restraint has really improved the film?

Harry Lighton: I take a massive issue with “family-friendly.” That’s actually a bit of a misconception. There isn’t actually [another cut]. This is the raciest version I wanted to put out there. I think we cut out one shot, which was like a closeup of the end of Ray’s penis, and I just cut that out because it made the audience laugh at a moment where I wanted them to kind of take the moment seriously.

Alexander Skarsgård: People were laughing at my penis? [laughs]

Thanks to Alexander Skarsgård, Harry Lighton, and Harry Melling for taking the time to talk about Pillion.