7 Strangest Things Actors Had To Do To Win Movie Roles

2. Keira Knightley Had To Show Director David Cronenberg Her Weird Sex Faces (A Dangerous Method)

Dangerous Method
Paramount

Legendary director David Cronenberg isn't exactly known for making family-friendly entertainment. From the gross-out body horror of The Fly to the graphic sexual content in Crash, the mature themes found in most of his movies have generated a lot of controversy in film circles over the years.

2011's A Dangerous Method is also similarly adult, a sexually-charged tale about the relationships between Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Sabina Spielrein, and in order to win that latter role, Knightley had to prove to Cronenberg that she was capable of conveying the movie's sexual content in an effective manner.

How? She had to show him her crazy sex faces.

Knightley shared this story while appearing on The Graham Norton Show, where she revealed that Cronenberg Skyped her and told her to show him her very best "weird sex faces". Eager to prove that she was right for the role... she obliged:

"I had to go on Skype with David Cronenberg, so that he could see what my planned weird sex faces were. It's awful on every level because I'd never met him before... they were meant to be, like, horrible sex faces."

Unfortunately though, Skype froze, and the screen got stuck on an image of her face contorted into a strange, yet sexy expression. How humiliating.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!