In the latest episode of Westworld, “Contrapasso”, Billy (Jimmi Simpson), Logan (Ben Barnes) and Delores (Evan Rachel Wood) made it to the town at the edge of the park, Pariah. If the name wasn’t enough of a clue about what kind of town it was, there was a big old orgy to make it clear.
Image: John P. Johnson/HBO
One of the show’s executive producers, Richard J. Lewis, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about a number of things in the episode, none more interesting than this: Apparently filming a sex party is harder than you’d think, and requires bringing in special help.
Unsurprisingly, you can’t just hire regular extras for your orgy:
We hired what they called “special extras,” “special background players,” who were willing to participate. We also had a sex stylist who made sure things looked properly choreographed in that regard. It was all hands on deck, to say the silly pun. We were trying to make things feel elegant and graceful and beautiful and strange.
Incidentally, if there is some way to put “sex stylist” on my resume, I would very much like the opportunity.
Lewis explained that the look of the orgy owed a lot to Eyes Wide Shut, “some Kubrickian stuff that’s there” and 120 Days of Sodom. “We really curated the scene to the T,” added Lewis. “Sometimes, to me, it has almost a medieval flavour. You can’t categorise it, because it’s so uniquely strange and beautiful in a way.”
The “medieval” comment — and as THR points out, the almost Roman plushness of the scene — brings to mind the other two parks that existed in the original movie, Medieval World and Roman World. Even though Lewis says that the similarity isn’t “intentional”, it would be very in the mode of this show for something as obviously pandering as an orgy to have so many thematic levels to it.
But that’s still not all, because the orgy was shot in a mausoleum in Compton, California. My casual research says it’s Angeles Abbey Memorial Park, which has a mausoleum that has the right architecture. Lewis said it was “a very narrow building where essentially 40,000 bodies are buried above ground. It was a strange place to begin with. It had a very haunting flavour to it, right from the get go. (Laughs.) It was very surreal.”
In all honesty, it makes sense that there’d be all this work involved in a large sex scene. Westworld‘s been meticulous in trying to make sure everything it does isn’t just titillation for titillation’s sake. Which means that they were going to have to do everything possible to make sure they weren’t simply making pornography. This is a point emphasised by Lewis, who said, “I think all of us have a modicum of taste that keeps us from taking it too far into the pornographic world and keeps it in the sensual world. I think that’s important.”
Just a smidge of taste needed, clearly. Well, that, and the freedom given by being on HBO and not anywhere else.