The Seduction is a prequel of Dangerous Liaisons – so of course it was going to have a dangerous (pun intended) amount of intimacy. For Isabelle de Merteuil (Anamaria Vartolomei) and Madame de Rosemonde (Diane Kruger), sex is power and the social currency they use to claw their way to society's upper echelons.
From the moment we pressed play on the HBO Max show, there was a slew of partially-clothed bodies. However, as we approach The Seduction episode 3, these scenes become a lot more nuanced and layered.
Lucas Bravo says filming The Seduction scenes played 'tricks on the mind'
"We had a lot of discussions beforehand," Bravo tells me. "We had an intimacy coordinator that literally sent us, like, long, like, pages of 'where do I agree to be touched? What can I touch? What do I want? What am I trying to avoid?' It was very precise.
"We would meet each other in this gymnasium and with mattresses see how we could struggle on the floor, be thrown around and all that stuff. We were in complete awareness of what we could and couldn't do, and what we wanted to the show to look like. There were no surprises on the day, and the intimacy coordinator was always around.
It's what Bravo says next that I find particularly interesting given the industry's debate on whether or not intimacy coordinators are always needed in these situations.
"But we're mature actors, and I know that intimacy coordinators are in place for people that maybe don't feel safe and need need a third party. For us, we had that conversation beforehand, and we were very comfortable with where we wanted this to go and how shocking we wanted certain scenes to be. So once we started shooting, we felt pretty safe.
"Don't get me wrong, there's always moments. When I was strangling Diane for an entire afternoon, I was saying to myself, 'you're still a good person. You're still a good person.' This is a character, but it plays tricks on your mind. where does Gercourt start and where where do I begin?"
It feels just as intense filming these scenes as it does watching, particularly as amorous interactions in The Seduction often turn sour.
In a strange way, I'm really proud of Bravo. This is undoubtedly one of his best roles yet, and I'm so pleased that audiences on a global scale are seeing him as something other than Gabriel in Emily in Paris. He plays an incredibly convincing and manipulative villain, and clearly, he's put the work into doing so.
For anyone in the US, why not take advantage of the below HBO Max to stay up to date with new episodes of The Seduction?
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