Warning: This post contains spoilers for the series finale of HBO’s “Mrs. Fletcher”
At the tender age of 19, Owen Teague found himself filming the first sex scene of his career.
The actor, known for the role of Patrick Hockstetter in the 2017 remake of “It” and its sequel, plays the young Julian Spitzer in HBO’s “Mrs. Fletcher.” Based on the novel by Tom Perrotta, the series tells the story of Eve Fletcher (Kathryn Hahn), a single mother who rediscovers her sexuality after her son leaves for college. Teague’s character Julian develops a mutual crush on Eve — who happens to be the mother of his high school bully.
TheWrap caught up with Teague ahead of Sunday’s series finale to talk about that wild threesome scene, and what it was like to shoot the first sex scene of his career — in which his character has a threesome with two women, one of whom is more than twice his age — in the company of an intimacy coordinator.
“It was fantastic. I was very, very nervous about that scene,” he told TheWrap. “What would it be like, and how we would figure out what that scene was?” he recalls thinking. “And then Claire Warden, who intimacy-coordinated us, came in and basically treated it like choreography, like a dance, or choreographing a fight, and made it feel very safe.”
He went on to describe the mechanics of shooting the scene, in which Julian, Eve, and her friend Amanda (Katie Kershaw) end up in bed together after a late-night party.
“We would all set limits and boundaries, and be like, ‘Okay, here’s what I don’t want to do, here’s what’s cool,’” he said. “And [Warden] taught us how to talk about it, and taught us how to check-in and make sure everyone else was okay… It felt so good to do, and it shocked me. I wouldn’t ever want to do a scene like that without an intimacy coordinator, and I don’t think anyone should have to. Maybe they are making it a mandatory thing now, and that’s really good, because they save actors.”
Teague, whose next project is another Stephen King project, “The Stand” on CBS All Access, also described the conversations he had with his co-stars.
“I think that situation with those two actors and with Claire [Warden] and our director Gillian [Robespierre], and our DP Jeff [Waldron], they were the only people in the room when we did that. And Katy Kershaw and Katheryn were two people I trusted basically completely, and so it was like the best possible scenario for that. It couldn’t have felt better to do,” he said.
“So I guess it sets a really high precedent in terms of my life for the rest of sex scenes. I can only hope that they’ll feel that okay in the future, that they’ll be that safe and that trusting.”
All seven episodes of “Mrs. Fletcher” are now streaming on HBO.