10 Actors Who Really Did It In Movies

A typically controversial effort from Danish director Lars von Trier, two-part art film Nymphomaniac starred Charlotte Gainsbourg as a sex addict who recounts her sexual experiences over the years with co-stars including Shia LaBeouf, Jamie Bell and Hugo Speer. While it’s by no means a jolly film – it’s the third and final instalment in von Trier’s Depression trilogy, which says a lot – it certainly lives up to its title.

There is a catch with Nymphomaniac though. Although the sex we see is indeed unstimulated, it’s not actually performed by the movie’s main stars but by porn actors acting as body doubles which was then digitally imposed into the scene. So, no you do not get to see Shia LaBeouf’s penis. Sorry to disappoint.

Anyone familiar with von Trier’s oeuvre shouldn’t be too surprised though. He pulled the same ‘swapping star genitals for body double genitals’ shtick in both The Idiots (1998) and Antichrist (2009).

Unofficially hailed as the most sexually explicit British film ever made, Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs is a modern love story (apparently) set in London that focuses on the brief but passionate relationship between climatologist Matt and his American exchange student girlfriend Lisa who seem to have only one thing in common – a shared love of music and sex.

Framed around nine songs (hence the title), the movie was accused of being plotless by unimpressed critics and pretty much consists of concert footage interspersed with scenes from the couple’s sex life. Most oddly, there’s nary an Al Green track in earshot on the 9 Songs soundtrack but rather indie efforts from the likes of Elbow, which may speak for how boring the sex sometimes seems.

There is a bathtub footjob scene in 9 Songs, however, and it allowed star Kieran O'Brien to boast the privilege of being the only actor who’s ejaculated in a mainstream UK produced film, so it has that going for it at least.

Dubbed female-friendly porn, Danish film All About Anna is basically a romantic comedy about a young woman who embarks on a series of non-committal affairs after being dumped by the love of her life in which the sex scenes aren’t merely obscured and implied fumbling before fading to black but totally real.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, All About Anna was co-produced by Nymphomaniac director Lars von Trier’s production company Zentropa and is one of its three sex films tailored to women alongside 1998’s Constance and 1999’s Pink Prison.

The film received a host of adult movie-oriented awards nominations including nods from the Adult Video News Awards and is notable for being the first Danish movie with pornographic content to be released on DVD with subtitles for deaf and hard of hearing viewers, which presumably must include a fair share of moaning and grunting.

Credited as the first theatrical American feature film to show unsimulated sex, Andy Warhol’s aptly titled Blue Movie starred Warhol superstars Viva and Louis Waldon and according to its creator wasn’t a film about sex but “a film about the Vietnam War and what we can do about it.”

To be fair, there is talk of the Vietnam War around its stars’ love scene but we’re guessing that’s not the main reason people went to see it.

Despite its release during the height of the sexual revolution the film still caused a stir after opening at the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre in Greenwich Village when police seized it and the New York Criminal Court later deemed it obscene.

Nonetheless, Blue Movie had quite the cultural impact and is considered an early player in the so-called ‘porno chic’ movement that later gave us films such as Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones. Cheers for that, Mr. Warhol.

Notable for featuring the very first instance of an erect penis in a mainstream film, French director Catherine Breillat’s Romance follows a young woman who embarks on a journey of sexual self-discovery after her boyfriend refuses to have sex with her.

Banned in several countries including Ireland and Singapore for its graphic unsimulated content, the movie was perhaps surprisingly released uncut in the often prudish United Kingdom by the BBFC under the reasoning that it was ‘very French’.

Real-life porn star Rocco Siffredi – aka the ‘Italian Stallion’ and star of such films as Bend Over Brazilian Babes 2 and Buttman’s Big Tit Adventure 3 – brought his years of experience to the film but it wasn’t enough to impress every critic, some of whom denounced it as clinical, un-titillating and even sleep-inducing. Well, you can’t win them all Catherine.

A biting satire of what he calls ‘terrorist chic’, cult queer filmmaker Bruce LaBruce’s The Raspberry Reich follows an all-male band of lefty radicals modelled on the Baader-Meinhof Gang and led by a charismatic female leader who commands them to kidnap the son of a wealthy industrialist and join what she terms ‘The Homosexual Intifada’.

Which basically means encouraging her male comrades to have sex with each through rousing diatribes against heterosexual societal norms littered with slogans like "Are you revolutionary enough to give up your girlfriends?" and "Heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses".

In 2005, a Paris court judged that The Raspberry Reich could no longer be shown funnily enough not for breaching any obscenity laws but because of its unauthorised use of late photographer Alberto Korda’s iconic image of Che Guevara which appeared on a wall in a scene in which a dude fellates a handgun.

Compared to some of the films on this list, The Brown Bunny is relatively tame. In fact, there’s only once instance of unsimulated sex – a now infamous oral sex scene – and it’s towards the end of the movie. Perhaps what made it more shocking was that its stars, indie darlings Vincent Gallo and Chloe Sevigny, were quite big names when the film was released in 2003.

But what seemed to offend reviewers more than its blow job scene was that the film wasn’t actually all that good. A press screening at Cannes prompted walkouts (it’s unclear if they made it as far as the money shot before leaving) and critic Roger Ebert proclaimed it “the worst movie in the history of the Cannes Film Festival.”

This sparked a war of words between Gallo, who also directed The Brown Bunny, and Ebert with the former calling the film critic "a fat pig with the physique of a slave trader" and Ebert responding in kind by reminding Gallo that his film still sucked (pun intended?) regardless of his weight.

The Gallo-Ebert drama was probably more interesting than the infamous fellatio, truth be told.

One of the more, shall we say, ‘avant-garde’ movies on this list, In the Realm of the Senses is a fictionalised retelling of unlikely folk hero Sada Abe – a Japanese prostitute who in 1936 embarked on an intense, obsessive affair with her employer that ended with her killing him via erotic asphyxiation and chopping off his penis as a keepsake.

It stirred up plenty of controversy after its 1976 release and its uncut version remains banned in its native Japan where it broke taboo by showing not only 100% real sex but pubic hair too which was apparently a big no-no until Japan’s obscenity laws were relaxed somewhat in the 1990s.

Mind, it’s not so much the appearance of pubic hair that’s so bad but rather the fact that we see it being eaten. Oh, and at one point a hardboiled egg is inserted into the leading lady’s vagina. So yeah... avant-garde.

Argentinian director Gaspar Noé first dabbled with unsimulated sex in his trippy Tokyo-set drama Enter the Void in 2009 but went all out with his latest film, 2015’s Love. Set in Paris and told in flashback, the movie recounts the relationship between American film student Murphy and his French ex-girlfriend Electra in all its intimate glory.

Described by Noé as the kind of film that gives dudes “a hard-on and make girls cry”, Love features sex scenes including but by no means limited to fellatio, cunnilingus, mutual masturbation, anilingus and threesomes. On a list like this that’s nothing to get your knickers in a twist over, but what made Noé’s film notable was the fact it was released in 3D.

One scene in particular, a 3D ‘money shot’, made quite a splash (literally). Just try and imagine the logistics behind shooting such a scene...

John Cameron Mitchell, the same genius mind behind 2001’s cult rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, returned in 2006 with his second directorial outing Shortbus – an erotic comedy-drama about a group of New Yorkers who attend an underground salon for the sexually challenged.

Hailed by film critic Lou Lumenick as "a rare example of a non-porn film that doesn’t exploit graphic sex as a gimmick", the film nevertheless caused a few ructions when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation threatened to fire Shortbus star Sook-Yin Lee from her regular gig for her participation in several graphic scenes. Thankfully, she kept her job after several celebrities including Yoko Ono, David Cronenberg and Michael Stipe kicked up a fuss.

There’s a little shout-out to its predecessor In the Realm of the Senses in the form of a vibrating egg branded with the film’s title but one of Shortbus’ most impressive scenes is one involving autofellatio which contrary to popular myth apparently doesn’t require the removal of several ribs. Good to know.