Drew Barrymore and Natalie Portman are getting candid about taking their clothes off on camera.
The US talk show host talked about doing nude scenes before the internet era after Natalie explained one of her on-screen no-gos during Tuesday’s episode of The Drew Barrymore Show.
Asked about the “one thing” she would “never do for a role” during a round of Pop Quiz, Natalie blushed and said: “That’s a good one. Um … show my boobs? Is that really prude?”
Drew, who did her first topless scene in 1993′s Doppelganger at the age of 18, was quick to tell her guest: “No, it’s not!”
“I’m just always like, ‘I don’t want my kids to see pictures online,’” explained a cringing Natalie, who shares 12-year-old son Aleph and six-year-old daughter Amalia with her estranged husband Benjamin Millepied.
“I didn’t know there’d be an ‘online’ when I did it,” Drew laughed. “I was like, ‘Good luck finding that magazine under some weird guy’s bed in some random house!’”
Though Natalie has appeared au naturale on camera in the past, she declared a moratorium on nude scenes after appearing in the 2007 Wes Anderson short Hotel Chevalier.
“The thing is – and maybe I’ve brought it on myself by talking about nudity so much – it’s still the thing that people talk about more than the short,” Natalie told The Guardian following the film’s release. “And that’s the thing that makes me think maybe I shouldn’t have done it.”
“It’s not that I regret the actual thing,” she continued. “But it really depresses me that what I think is a wonderful film, that I’m really happy with – and Wes put a lot of time and energy into planning shots and writing the script, it’s very minimal, very exact – and then at the end literally half of any article or review about it has been about the nudity.”
Drew said she reevaluated her “exhibitionist” impulses after famously flashing David Letterman on his show in 1995.
“As I watched myself and my friends laughing from an objective perspective, I realised right then and there that this was the end of an era for me,” she wrote in her 2015 book Wildflower.
“And so I started my journey into no sex scenes in movies, modesty clauses in my contracts, and a total lack of nudity in any public forum from there on out.”