Aubrey Plaza has revealed that she was instructed to “really masturbate” in a scene in “The To-Do List.” The comedic actress appeared in the movie all the way back in 2013. She played nerdy teenager Brandy Clark who was getting to know her body a bit before heading off to college. Plaza herself was nervous about the scene, which she assumed would, of course, be faked. She was wrong.
- The director wanted her to do the deed for real. As Plaza revealed during an interview with Conan O’Brien, she thought it would be easy enough to pretend to pleasure herself for the scene, but things didn’t turn out that way. “In my head, I envisioned a nice scene where you see my hand slowly go out of frame,” she recalled. “That’s what I thought I was going into, but then when I showed up, the camera was mounted on the ceiling, I was in my underwear and a Clinton t-shirt, and there were a bunch of old men smoking, ya know, the crew guys. And then I went and touched myself.”
- To be clear, the men weren’t really smoking. However, there were a whole lot of them standing around on the set of “The To-Do List” and Aubrey Plaza felt awkward about having to even simulate masturbation in front of them. So, she talked to director Maggie Carey about it.
- The director didn’t have much sympathy for Plaza. “I thought I was doing one thing and then when I showed up, it was a whole different thing, it was a full body shot,” she remembered. “And I asked the director, ‘What should I do?’ And she said, ‘Masturbate, like it says in the script.'”
- Filming the scene was an experience the actress will never forget. “Looking back on it, I feel like the masturbating scene was a little bit the most nerve-racking,” she told Oregon Live. “Just because in my head I thought, ‘Oh, we’ll probably shoot this in a way where I don’t really have to really do it.’ But then when we did it and I was like, ‘Oh no, we’re going to shoot it where I do it.'”
