Pedestrian talks sex, sex, and more sex with Lizzy Caplan.
You play Virginia Johnson on Masters of Sex. Tell us about your character. Virginia is very hard to pin down. She’s a mother who is extremely career-driven. She is a very open person – and certainly open-minded – but she also tries to maintain a certain level of privacy. In her research with Dr. Masters (Michael Sheen), Virginia knows she has to give the work her full attention. And as the season goes on, this starts to become increasingly difficult. Eventually, we will see Virginia actively picking the work over her children. She chooses this life over that life. It will be very interesting to see how audiences react to that.
Have you done specific research to prepare for your role as Virginia Johnson? The book was a really a big inspiration. It really gave me a lot of insight into the relationship between Dr. Masters and Virginia Johnson. They were notoriously private people, so there aren’t tons of books about their relationship. Though there are some YouTube clips of Masters and Johnson speaking. I actually met a woman who had been to one of their clinical trials. It was fascinating. This woman had nothing but great things to say about them, but she didn’t want to give me too many details, which I found quite interesting.
How has it been working with Michael Sheen? It’s been a blast! I adore and respect Michael, and we have a really good time together. It’s a difficult combination to find. One of our main goals in portraying these very famous historical characters was to keep the relationship as cloudy and unclear as possible. In a way, it’s sort of what Masters and Johnson themselves were forced to do in order to further their research. Michael and I spent a lot of time together during the shoot. On the first season of a TV show there’s always a lot of talk about how it feels to be on that show. You talk about how the show is run, you talk about things you like or don’t like. As far as how Masters and Johnson should interact, Michael and I definitely had a handful of conversations – more than a handful – about what we thought we were trying to convey. What I appreciated the most about working with Michael was that we did most of that work on our own. I felt it was better that way. Because I didn’t want to know where he was coming from, and I assume the same goes for him.
There is some dark subject matter and heavy scenes in Masters of Sex. As an actress, how do you decompress from this material? I got better as the season went on, and I could leave it in the room. But those early episodes were really rough. There are scenes when Masters would yell at Virginia and it would shake me up and upset me. I’m not really used to that. I’m used to working on sets where everybody is joking around the entire time. There was a fair amount of joking around on this show, too, but we gave a lot of room to each other as actors to be able to go to those places. We were very respectful of that. I think it’s necessary. If someone were crying in the corner, you would just let that person cry because that’s what they needed to do.
Was it uncomfortable filming the various sexual experiments? Some of those scenes were effortless and some were really awkward. It’s really fascinating how your mind can just sort of tune it all out. In the pilot, I’d be thinking: “I can’t believe this girl is naked and we can’t react at all!” And then by the end, it was like: “All right…who’s naked today?” Let’s move it along, people, because everyone wants to go to lunch.
Do you think that the sex scenes will provoke controversy? I don’t know. I’ll be fascinated to see. In a way, I find the nudity and sexual content of this show less gratuitous than a number of other shows on TV because we’re not pretending our show is about anything else. The show is about sex researchers. The show is about sex. Of course we’re going to show a lot of sex. We’ll see what people think about that. We have some actual, intimate sex and then we have some really clinical sex. It’s not about dragons…just saying.
Masters Of Sex follows human sexuality pioneers Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) and William Masters (Michael Sheen) whose ground-breaking research into human sexuality ignited the sexual revolution. The pilot airs Thursday, October 3rd, 9:30pm on SBS ONE.
