“The Sessions” is the strange-but-true comedy-drama about 38-year-old handicapped writer Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes) who hires a sex surrogate (Helen Hunt) to take his virginity. In a new interview, Hunt admits she never heard of the profession before she signed on to the Ben Lewin directed flick but delved into the sex-heavy role after learning more about her character Cheryl Cohen Greene.
She tells Vulture that she was excited to play Greene because she “had this enthusiasm and this sense of adventure about sex, and I’d never seen anything like it.”
The Oscar winner, who is frequently nude in the film, admitted she was uncomfortable with roles involving nudity earlier in her career but felt fine taking it off for “The Sessions” director.
“One time in my twenties, I remember thinking, ‘I don’t like this.’ And I didn’t have much power at that time to do something about it. It’s terrible,” she told Vulture. “And, of course, when I met Ben the only thing that was going to deter me from doing the movie was if I got any sort of creepy vibe from this person. And I got the opposite of that: His wife drove him, his adorable daughter wanted to talk to me about surfing, and he was so well spoken. I could tell he had an interesting take on the whole thing. I felt scared to do the part, but I didn’t feel scared of that.”
Hunt admits to feeling vulnerable after filming intimate scenes with Hawkes for hours at a time. “I did feel like I wanted to put my clothes on [at the end of the day]…It was partly modesty, but then, that was blown ten minutes into the workday. It was more that I had to be vulnerable for so long. Twelve hours of that vulnerability! I loved it and felt liberated by it, but by the twelfth hour, I just wanted to be in my sweatpants, in my zip-up hoodie, socks on my feet, eating an In-N-Out burger in my bed.”
She encourages actresses in her twenties to embrace their choice of being naked for the camera: “You gotta pay your rent. You gotta pay your rent, and you have to feel good about your choices, you know what I mean?”