Yahoo Lifestyle Kaya Scodelario Just Revealed That She And Her Teen “Skins” Costars Were “So Grateful” To Be On The Show They Just Did What They Were Told When It Came To Gratuitous Sex Scenes
When the gritty British TV show Skins premiered back in 2007, it almost instantly became infamous for the graphic way that it depicted teenagers indulging in sex, drugs, and alcohol.
The show aired until 2012 and introduced a new cast every two seasons, becoming a kind of revolving door for young actors hoping to get their big break.
And many of the cast got precisely that, with Skins being one of the first TV gigs for many established stars around today, including Academy Award-winner Daniel Kaluuya, and nominee Dev Patel.
But in 2021, some former cast members began to lift the lid on their “fucked up” experience filming the show as a teenager — especially when it came to the sexual way that they were depicted on screen.
At the time, April Pearson, who played Michelle in Seasons 1 and 2 of Skins, opened up in a conversation with her fellow alumna Laya Lewis on her podcast Are You Michelle from Skins?
Laya played Liv in Seasons 5 and 6, meaning that she and April didn’t actually work on the show at the same time. However, they were unsurprised to learn that they had incredibly similar experiences.
Both actors admitted to feeling uncomfortable and unprotected when shooting sex scenes, and said that they have since realized they were “too young” to be stripping off on TV.
Long before the days of intimacy coordinators, the amateur teen actors had to shoot sex scenes on their very first day on set with little support or guidance.
“There’s a difference between being officially old enough and mentally old enough,” April said at the time. “I was having this conversation with my husband, and I was saying I do feel like I was too young, I feel like I wasn't protected."
She also said that every female cast member, “and some of the men,” she’d spoken to privately about the situation felt the same way as she did.
Shortly after the podcast episode dropped, Kaya Scodelario joined the conversation having shot to fame at the age of 14 as Effy in Season 1 of Skins — a character that had the rare feat of appearing in more than two seasons.
In a TikTok video, Kaya acknowledged the constant comparisons between Skins and Sam Levinson’s HBO drama Euphoria, which premiered in 2019 and stars the likes of Zendaya and Sydney Sweeney.
Euphoria has similarly gritty storylines about sex and drugs, but while the characters are teenagers, the actors who play them are in their early to mid-20s and have frequently spoken about advocating for some of their scripted gratuitous nudity to be cut from the show.
This is a stark contrast to Kaya’s personal experience, with the then-30-year-old actor sharing a video of herself looking shocked before relaxing and shrugging as a voiceover said: “Watching Euphoria for the first time thinking: 'This is crazy for 17-year-olds,' then remembering what I was doing on TV at 14.”
Kaya added in the caption: “Will always be grateful. But yeah safeguarding really wasnt a thing back then….” She also said that Skins caused her long-term “issues” in a follow-up comment.
A fan had asked: “Do you think being on Skins affected your mentality at that age?” and Kaya openly replied: “Yes. It was a beautiful time but also the deep rooted cause of a lot of my issues now. Still, it gave me the opportunity to do the job I loved.”
Later, Kaya’s on-screen love interest Jack O’Connell admitted that his experience of filming sex and nude scenes for Skins "wasn’t right," with Jack playing Cook in Seasons 3 and 4 of the drama.
After Skins, Jack continued to strip off for his roles — even appearing totally naked on stage for the West End production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and baring all in the 2013 movie Starred Up.
He appeared nude again in the Netflix adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 2022, and in an interview with the Independent, Jack said that he had been “very naive” when he starred in Skins at 17.
In fact, Jack said that he didn’t ever question whether or not he was comfortable with what he was being asked to do as Cook, and just unquestioningly accepted the sex and nudity as “part and parcel” of being on the show.
“It’s hard to say that you’re ever totally comfortable [filming sex scenes],” he explained. “Listen, I admit I was very naive at the time, enough so as to not check in with myself and question myself if I was feeling comfortable or not. It just felt like part and parcel of the program in a very different time than the one we’re in now.”
Jack went on to add that while he felt “very compromised” on Skins, the most important thing is everybody learns from it so that the issues don’t happen again.
And in a new interview, Kaya has echoed this sentiment, and even revealed that she was able to implement what she’d learned the first time around when she returned for the Skins spin-off series Skins: Fire in 2013.
The star had left the show three years earlier — shortly after her 18th birthday — and said that when she received the original draft for the miniseries, it had a whole bunch of sex scenes in it.
Kaya theorized that this was because she was now over 18, so the show’s creators thought that they’d be able to get away with being more explicit.
However, she ended up putting her foot down and told producers that there was “no need” for her to be stripping off for the show — only feeling “strong enough” to speak out because she’d worked on other sets by this point.
“I felt much more confident in saying what I felt during that series,” Kaya told the Guardian. “When the first draft came through, there were a lot of sex scenes in it, and I could tell it was because I turned 18, and that meant that they could show more. And I went back and said: ‘No, there’s no need to do that.’”
Reflecting on her time on Skins, she added: “Nothing too awful ever happened, thank God, but it could have, and I think that’s what’s scary about it. What’s wonderful now is that every production is aware that a sex scene is essentially a stunt, and it should be choreographed.”
Discussing herself and her young castmates, she explained: “[We] were so grateful and happy to be there that we did as we were told most of the time. But this was a show that was created by older grownups, and it would have been cool to have more conversations as actors about what we were doing.”
In addition to the uncomfortable sex scenes, former cast members have revealed that they were also pressured into looking a certain way — and even encouraged to skip meals — while working on Skins.
Speaking on April’s podcast, Laya recalled the female cast members queuing up in their bikinis so that the male showrunner could approve their bodies before they filmed a swimwear scene.
“There was one point where we were told to skip breakfast, and for dinner, we should just have a jacket potato,” she said at the time. "We had to go to Morocco for the first episode of Season 6, and we each had to, in a bikini or our swimwear, one by one stand in a room with just us and the creator of the show.”
“He was male and a lot older than we were — we were between the ages of 16 and 18 — and be told if we looked good enough to film in Morocco,” Laya continued. "Costume told me to go first because I'm the most comfortable one, to show the other girls it's not that bad — but it was bad.”
“At the time, I thought it was horrible,” she added. “But I think it’s so much fucking worse now.”
April agreed: “At the time you're young and you don't know any better. You don't really know what to say, to speak out, is this OK. … And as with a lot of victims of trauma, you look back at it and think, Yeah, that was fucked up.”
Skins was created by father and son Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain, and in response to the full podcast episode, Bryan’s rep said in a statement: “We’re deeply and unambiguously sorry that any cast member was made to feel uncomfortable or inadequately respected in their work during their time on Skins. We're committed to continually evolving safe, trustworthy, and enjoyable working conditions for everyone who works in the TV industry."
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