Daniel Craig shares his recipe for a necessary sex scene

There's a lot of debate about the utility of the sex scene in storytelling, particularly because Gen Z is coming of age and, um, that's it. As a generation, they're not as interested in seeing sex on screen. So what makes a sex scene "necessary" to the plot? And do sex scenes have to be necessary? We now turn to Daniel Craig, who offers the perspective of one actor who has recently been in what's advertised as a very sexy movie (Queer).

Craig commented on the subject during Variety's Actors on Actors conversation with Josh O'Connor, the star of Luca Guadagnino's other 2024 feature, Challengers. Craig calls Challengers' hotel scene (the three-way kiss between O'Connor, Mike Faist, and Zendaya) "the biggest cock tease in movie history." But in the spirit of the tennis being the sex, he also says that "The sex is the least interesting thing in the scene." In Craig's opinion, "You have to play the truth of it the best you can. The only thing that’s going on is in the heads of these people; if you can’t see that, then the scene is just gratuitous. What are they doing there? What’s affecting them? All of these things. You owe it to a sex scene to have all those things in. Otherwise, it’s an excuse to get people naked."

For Craig, a self-described "tight-arsed Englishman," the atmosphere Guadagnino creates on set "of brilliant chaos, but also absolute focus" is something he found "very liberating." The actor also praises the filmmaker's approach to storytelling, noting that his films are all set up to "hit the moment of love," like the ecstatic final embrace in Challengers, where "you see a love between the two guys that trumps everything around it," Craig says. "I’m just a sucker for it. What else is there?"