‘Passages’ Star Franz Rogowski on Why the Gay Sex Scenes Felt So Real

In the short month that Passages has been out in the US, the film has generated much buzz for its artful depiction of gay sex. Given that the MPAA gave the film an NC-17 rating, there’s much more than buzz to those scenes. Now in a new interview with GQ, Passages star Franz Rogowski looked back on what made one particularly long scene with co-star Ben Whishaw so unforgettable. “It wasn’t real sex,” he said, “but we created real intimacy.”

Directed by Ira Sachs, Passages follows Parisian couple Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and Martin (Ben Whishaw). Their relationship, already strained by Tomas’s headstrong and independent appetites, is further challenged when Tomas falls for a woman he meets in a bar, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos).

As Rogowski described it, Tomas might be a self-absorbed artist type, but he’s much harder to pin down. “It’s great to play someone who isn’t easy to read,” he said. “I think Tomas is very much alive, and he causes a lot of drama, and trouble, and that’s good for the movie. But on the page it was hard to like him.”

Even in the face of chronic and seemingly cruel infidelity, Martin is inexorably drawn to Tomas. Their on-again, off-again relationship culminates in a very on-again sex scene—the likely catalyst for the NC-17 rating, which Sachs called “a form of cultural censorship.” Although the scene features no explicit imagery, the onscreen passion more than made up for that—in the minds of the MPAA censors, at least.

Rogowski credited the power of the scene to the innate chemistry brewing between him and Wishaw from their very first meeting. “Our conversation started with us sharing admiration and curiosity for the project, but also being a bit shy, as we knew that we’d be intimate in the film,” he recalled. “You can prepare as much as you want, but you never know how it’s going to be in front of the camera.”

When it came time to film the scene, Rogowski said they overcame those nerves by taking matters into their own hands—quite literally. “We had no intimacy coach; we created the intimacy ourselves,” he said. “We didn’t really know how it would work, so we were all nervous. We met, we walked it through. We knew that we would just have to jump right into it, and have sex.”

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“And I mean, it wasn’t real sex, but we created real intimacy: we were sweating, we were touching each other, rubbing our bodies together, you know, grabbing each others’ ass. I think it helped that we just trusted each other.

“I think a lot of it had to do with the duration, these very long takes,” he added. “Sometimes you shoot for like twenty seconds; we shot these scenes for five minutes, ten minutes. So it really felt like sex.”

Rogowski explained that ultimately the scene worked because he wanted to be there. “I love Ben, I think he’s wonderful as an artist, but also as a person, as an actor,” he said. “I wanted to be with him. I think, yeah, he felt the same way. So it was one of those projects where you really want to be there. That’s not always the case.”