Richard Armitage has admitted that his infamous feral sequence in Netflix’s new sexual thriller Obsession was mostly improvised.
The Hobbit star plays William, who lusts after his son’s fiancée, portrayed by Charlie Murphy, and unleashes an impulsive side as he forges secrets to begin a stormy romance – with catastrophic repercussions – in the sexual series.
In one scene, William discovers his lover’s hotel room, where he sniffs around the bed before crushing a pillow in search of smell.
‘It was incredibly surprising since it was scripted as quite a different scenario,’ he told Metro.co.uk exclusively on filming the sequence.
‘There was a tissue with her imprint of her lipstick on which we didn’t feel necessarily worked.
‘I was really conscious that it shouldn’t be in any way comedic so we sort of left it quite open and it was a bit of an improvisation actually.
‘Charlie had – without me knowing – sprayed her scent that she’d been wearing throughout the shoot into different parts of the bed and I just got the sense of it, and that’s where the scene just opened.
‘But the recording it wasn’t too planned, actually.’
Talking about taking on the dark role, Richard told us: ‘I read the page-turning script and I suppose I thought I’d never really tackled something like this before, I don’t know if I’m capable of it – not just the physical exposure, but I mean the kind of emotional arc that the character goes through. I love a challenge.’
During the sex sequences, Richard and Peaky Blinders star Charlie worked with an intimacy director, who had them practise in ‘dancing clothes’.
Talking about working with the intimacy director, Richard called it ‘fulfilling’, saying: ‘We both have done intimacy in the past where we’ve been left to our own devices a little bit so its dependent on you making those negotiations and hoping they’re on the same page.
‘But it was not just like guidance but another artistic brain in the room to help us develop the shape of what the physical vocabulary was going to be like.’
Charlie added: ‘We spent more time than I have ever done in the past on scenes, they were like that’s the dance, you know, but finally it was given some air time, and it made me think more about what I was doing and go, “Oh my god I’ve never really thought about what it was to do that, have sex with that person in that moment for those characters, what the fall out is”.
‘You kind of read it in script and go and do the thing because there’s never been any airtime for it.
‘So it’s really given me a whole other language to consider with her arc, with anything, and going forward reading other scripts since then… I know what the process is of creating the character because we’ve touched that world with such giving directors. It’s so empowering.’
Obsession is available to watch only on Netflix from Thursday, April 13.
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