“I don’t think there’s a version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that is toned down…”
Give credit to actor Jack O’Connell where it’s due: He did not roll his eyes while stating the obvious in response to a question about his new Netflix adaptation of the classic, controversial story. What is gained by showing the sex scenes between the story’s forbidden lovers in graphic detail, instead of leaving things to the viewer’s imagination? This is Lady Chatterley’s Lover. As O’Connell says, “I don’t think any of that should be happening off screen.”
O’Connell, who has made a ferocious impression in films like Unbroken and Jungleland, as well as TV series like Godless and Skins, is speaking with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed just as the new take on the 1928 novel by D.H. Lawrence hit the streaming service. It’s been a mainstay in the top five of the platform’s most-watched movies since it debuted on Friday, and the reaction to the film’s steamy scenes on social media has been… effusive.
As with Netflix’s more erotic fare, like fellow period drama Bridgerton or the borderline pornographic 365 Days franchise, users on TikTok are posting footage of the film’s sex scenes along with their hot-and-bothered reactions. (One such video is captioned, “Girls do not walk !! RUN TO NETFLIX !!”) Thirst posts reveling in the film’s sensuality and nudity are so rampant on Twitter that major publications have started to round them up and report on them as a viral phenomenon. (A user by the name of “pussymus prime” tweeted, “the sluttiest thing a man can do is be jack o’connell in lady chatterley’s lover.”)
That is to say, the decision to be realistic about sex, pleasure, and desire—and similarly realistic about showing skin in those scenes—has already made this adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover hugely popular and well-reviewed. O’Connell’s performance and his understanding of the importance of those risqué elements, something that not many actors are particularly eager to brave, are the driving force of that reception. Being willing to bare all (and we mean all), could be a game-changer in his career.
@functionsonicedcoffee___ Lady Chatterley's Lover. You're welcome. #jackoconnell#netflix#fyp#ladychatterleyslover ♬ HOTEL - L | E
The story begins on the wedding day of Constance Reed (The Crown’s Emma Corrin) to Sir Clifford Chatterley (Matthew Duckett), with whom she appears to be madly in love. When Clifford returns from war, he is paralyzed from the waist down and can no longer perform in bed. While the couple still reads together and engages in lively intellectual conversations with dinner guests, Connie becomes sexually frustrated, to the point that it becomes a preoccupation. Her mind is satiated with Clifford. But what about her body?
While on a walk through their countryside estate, she encounters Oliver Mellors, a burly gamekeeper who, especially as portrayed by O’Connell, is essentially a walking, talking pheromone. At first they bond over books, but then the irresistible attraction takes over. It’s a carnal desire. The connection borders on feral. They become obsessed with each other, though their affair is forbidden.
“I think what makes the book stand out is that it’s explicit, in order to portray what was beautiful about their relationship,” O’Connell says. “You have the meeting of the minds, but also the emotional, physical attraction.”
“You read the book and you just go, well, this is fucking phenomenal,” he adds. “So you want to put that on screen the best way you possibly can.”
In this version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, that means not being shy about the sex. Connie and Mellors, in scenes acted out by Corrin and O’Connell, do it on the floor of his rickety cottage. They do it outside in the mud. You see them strip off their clothes, tease each other with foreplay, and contort their bodies into various permutations of sexual positions. It all climaxes, if you will, in an ecstatic scene in which both Corrin and O’Connell get fully naked and dance in the rain together, uninhibited in a state of pure bliss.
The explicit nature of what we see both is and isn’t the point of these sequences. As O’Connell says, it’s key to understanding the intensity of their connection: one that is of both mind and body. But there’s something transgressive about them that still reverberates today, in a 2022 version of the story streaming on Netflix. The film is unapologetically horny and celebrates pleasure, yet it also illustrates how passion can be both intense and physical while also extremely tender. It’s the collision of all of those things that is so life-altering for Connie and Mellors, as they grapple with whether they even have a right to pursue or embrace it.
All of this supports O’Connell’s assertion that there shouldn’t be a version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that is toned down, though Netflix’s adaptation is certainly an anomaly. Historically, films, and TV shows based on the novel are bafflingly chaste, as the work itself has a long history of censorship. (The book was banned under obscenity laws in the U.S. until 1959. A French film premiered here the same year, after four years of being prohibited because of its content.)
Given that history, and with the knowledge that this take on the material was going to eschew the tradition of prudishness and finally depict the story as intended, signing on for a film like this naturally gives some actors pause. Doing sex scenes and full-frontal nudity in the age of the internet—and screengrabs—requires careful consideration.
“You have to try and understand what kind of taste it’s going to be approached with,” O’Connell says. “It was immediately apparent that, with Laure, there was going to be nothing gratuitous—nothing that would just be trying to entertain a shock value to an audience.”
Many people first became aware of O’Connell through his role in the British teen soap Skins, which he joined in 2009 when he was 19. The series was notorious for its frank and often graphic depictions of teenagers’ partying and sexual escapades—and for its young cast’s nude scenes. In some ways, that may have shaped how O’Connell views the experience of filming those kinds of scenes throughout his career, and whether or not they’re necessary in a project.
“That must have equipped me with something, because it felt like every other week we were doing scenes of that nature,” he says. “I think you have to learn how to police it yourself. We certainly did not have an intimacy coordinator on Skins. So you had to figure out what’s reasonable and what isn’t. And thankfully, I never had any experience with anyone pushing boundaries, so to speak.”
There was, however, an intimacy coordinator on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who insisted on a weeks-long rehearsal period so that Corrin and O’Connell could get comfortable with the parameters of the sex scenes. It’s something that O’Connell says was invaluable, not just for feeling comfortable in those sequences, but for being able to craft the relationship between their characters that would be the pulse of the film.
It’s at this point that we’re well aware we’ve spent a lengthy amount of time talking about sex scenes and nudity. Sure, they’re an integral element of the movie, which wouldn’t work without either element. But there’s also something that feels crass about it. What does O’Connell make of that obsession?
“I don’t know the answer to that, other than I guess it sells,” he says, smirking into his Zoom camera. “It’s age-old. It sells. Other than that, I don’t really know any in-depth way of answering that one.”
