Stacy Martin: Parents 'Cool' With Explicit Sex Scenes

'Nymphomaniac' star's parents 'cool' with explicit sex scenes

Hollywood newcomer Stacy Martin has publicly thanked her "cool" parents for supporting her through her big breakthrough in Lars Von Trier's controversial new movie Nymphomaniac.

The actress bares all and appears to actually have sex with Shia LaBeouf in the film, but she has explained director Von Trier called on "porn doubles" to actually make love in the graphic scenes.

She admits she didn't have to have any awkward conversations with her folks about her role in the film as they understood it was just a job.

Martin tells WENN, "From the start I always told them what I was doing and they said, 'You just had to start with something like that! You're our daughter. You couldn't start with a Disney movie, with a small play?'

"From then on they were very supportive and I showed them the film. My mom thought she would have nightmares and she woke up the next day and she didn't and really enjoyed the film and thought it was funny. They knew I had a porn double. I'd call my mum from the set and say, 'Oh yeah, so tomorrow I need to get my prosthetic vagina done and then we need to talk about the b***job scene'.

"What other job can you say things like this to your mom? She was like, 'OK, well have a nice sleep and take your vitamins. Good night'. I'm so lucky because they understand and support me."

Two years ago, Martin was an unknown actress studying in London when she was discovered at a casting for a fashion campaign by Des Hamilton, who helped cast von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia. (Martin suspects it was because she could pass for a youthful version of Gainsbourg’s mother Jane Birkin.) “I thought it was a complete lie,” she said. “Like, ‘I’m here for a fashion campaign, and you’re talking about a Lars von Trier film? Plus, you’re crazy for thinking of me for the part.’” Yet she found herself on an early morning flight to Copenhagen to do a screen test with the provocative Danish auteur. She read a few of the film’s emotional moments, but none of the intensely graphic sex scenes. Afterwards, von Trier showed her the prosthetic penises that he had made. In addition, he explained, he planned to use footage of live sex performed by “porn doubles,” which he would then digitally impose over the actors’ bodies in postproduction. (Of encountering her “vagina double,” Martin noted, “She was brunette, about my height—but we didn’t, like, hang out.”)

When she saw the finished scenes, Martin was taken aback by how real the sex looked. “I was shocked,” she said. “I couldn’t find the seams at all. It was a little annoying, but also, well, thank god it wasn’t really me.

On set, the whole process was anything but sexy, according to Stacy Martin, the 23 year-old actress who plays the younger version of the main character Joe. When I spoke with her at the press day for "Nymphomaniac" she walked me through what filming a sex scene was like before it was altered.

While most the composite footage won't make it into US theaters, the uncut version of the sex scenes only featured the midsection of the actors' porn double. Everything above or below actually belonged to Martin or LaBeouf, for example.

You'd think that removing all spontaneity from a sex scene would kill any believable chemistry, but for "Nymphomaniac" every move had to be carefully predetermined.

"Basically, we would do the scenes," Martin said. "What happens is that we have to agree on a position because of the CGI. Everything has to be set, so we would do the scene with Shia or whoever it was, and we would get little black dots on our bodies," Martin said. "It was very unerotic, very technical and it gets quite boring because then they have to do exactly the same with the porn doubles. But they're having real sex, and they put the two together."

All of the uncomfortable waiting and black dot application was worth it for Martin, however, because she got to work with the esteemed director without having to become a porn star.

"It's incredible, and I can be in a Lars Von Trier movie and not have sex," she said. "It's fantastic."