5 Male Actors Who Didn't Wear A Prosthetic For Nude Scenes

Going completely nude on a film set definitely seems like a daunting prospect, if we're being honest; whether the scene is supposed to be sexy, funny, or just sort of jarring, at the end of the day you're just an actor standing around with your bits out in a room full of people holding cameras and lights. That's probably why some male actors elect to use a prosthetic penis if they're required to go full-frontal for a role — for example, Mark Wahlberg's big reveal in Paul Thomas Anderson's "Boogie Nights" was a fake, and as he told Vulture in 2022, he still has the prop at home. (It feels important to note that female actors aren't afforded such luxuries and just have to bare it all, but that's neither here nor there.)

These actors, though, bravely forged ahead without prosthetics for their projects and truly went naked on-screen (and some of them, as they told various outlets, are a little bit bummed that screenshots of the scenes in question are pretty widely available). From campy thrillers set in stately British manors to medieval period pieces to a beloved breakup comedy, here are five times that male actors went fully nude without the help of prosthetics.

Netflix's original period piece "The Outlaw King" is, by and large, a pretty unsexy movie ... but much ado was made about the fact that star Chris Pine fully stripped down for his role in the film. During the press tour, Pine even told The Hollywood Reporter that he was a bit baffled by the attention paid to his, uh, parts. "There's so much beheading in this, and yet people want to talk about my penis," Pine said in 2018, the year the film was released. "I think that says something about our society, where people can get disemboweled, but it's the man's junk that is of interest."

So what is "The Outlaw King" even about? In the film — which focuses on the Scottish Wars of Independence that took place in the early 1300s — Pine plays Robert Bruce, the "King of Scots" who helped the fledgling country gain their independence from the then-kingdom of England. Though Robert initially pledges his loyalty to King Edward I of England (Stephen Dillane), he eventually turns against the monarchy to fight for Scottish independence by staging riots and rebellions against the controlling kingdom; along the way, he emerges fully naked from a lake.

"I wouldn't obviously do it if I didn't feel it was important," Pine told THR of his nude scene. "We're just base animals. I thought it was very important to see this man who's going to have power be an animal." Whether or not Pine's point got across is up for debate; unfortunately for the film's plot, a lot of viewers probably got distracted by his very real on-screen nudity.

By the time he starred in "Saltburn," Barry Keoghan already had an Oscar nomination under his belt (for "The Banshees of Inisherin" just one year prior), but his starring role in writer-director Emerald Fennell's follow-up to "Promising Young Woman" skyrocketed him to a new level of fame. "Saltburn" watches as Keoghan's Oliver Quick quietly and successfully infiltrates the wealthy Catton family, beginning with his classmate Felix (Jacob Elordi); at the end of the film, Oliver has stolen the family's country manor of Saltburn by either outright killing each Catton or contributing to their death in some way. That's when Oliver, now the man of the house, dances through the enormous British manse completely naked in a scene set to Sophie Ellis-Bextor's "Murder on the Dancefloor," having an absolute ball — and though there are plenty of wild moments to discuss in "Saltburn," this one definitely made an impression.

So did Keoghan really bare all? Apparently, he did! As the actor told Entertainment Weekly, the nudity felt like the correct choice for the moment. "It totally felt right. It's ownership. This is my place. It's full confidence in, 'I can do what I want in this manor. I can strip to my barest and waltz around because this is mine.' Yeah... it was fun."

Still, Keoghan says he was nervous at first ... but got used to the whole situation as they kept filming. "The initial thing was about me having no clothes on ... I'm a bit, ehhh," Keoghan admitted. "But after take one, I was ready to go. I was like, 'Let's go again. Let's go again.' You kind of forget, because there's such a comfortable environment created, and it gives you that license to go, 'All right, this is about the story now.'"

During his time on "How I Met Your Mother," Jason Segel made a splash on the big screen with "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," a movie he wrote that ultimately became one of the actor's most enduring and beloved projects. The breakup comedy sees Segel playing Peter Bretter, a composer whose extremely famous girlfriend Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) breaks up with him after nearly a decade together. 

Somehow, Segel and Bell manage to play a straight-faced and even gut-wrenching breakup scene while Segel is completely nude (because Sarah gets home just as Peter gets out of the shower). According to director Nicholas Stoller, Segel came up with the idea himself — because Segel has also said it was inspired by a real breakup. "[Jason] and I were talking about the script and he said he thought it would be funny if he showed his penis in the opening," Stoller told Entertainment Weekly. "I was like, 'I don't think you can do that.' I literally just didn't think you could do it. And then in this meeting at Universal, he said, 'I really think it would be funny if I did full frontal in that scene,' and everyone laughed. I was like, 'Oh, I guess you can do that.'"

As for Bell, she said that when Segel was nervous on set, she couldn't take him seriously — because he put himself into the situation. "I was like, 'You wrote this, bro! You didn't need to write it if you didn't want to do it.'" Segel definitely did do the scene, and no prosthetics were involved in the process.

The 2020 miniseries "Normal People," based on the hit novel of the same name by Sally Rooney, has a lot of sex in it — and as a result, stars Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones both bared it all on camera. The story, which spans a number of years, follows Connell Waldron (Mescal) and Marianne Sheridan (Edgar-Jones), who meet in school in Ireland and remain a part of each others' lives in some fashion for years until they're both set to graduate from Trinity College in Dublin. When they first meet, Connell and Marianne immediately form an intimate connection, and Mescal spoke to British outlet The Sun about why he felt as if he needed to show it all in order to help "Normal People" succeed to the fullest.

"We worked hard to make it feel like it was a real, accurate and truthful representation of sex amongst young people," Mescal explained. "It's something I'm incredibly proud of. I wouldn't like to have done the show without nudity in it because the book is so visceral and raw, and when I read the book the characters are clearly naked in my head."

Mescal made a big bet, and it paid off; the miniseries put both him and Edgar-Jones on the map and led to a huge career boom for both of them (Mescal was even nominated for an Emmy for his role as Connell). Since then, Mescal and Edgar-Jones have both starred in enormous projects — and Mescal has admitted that there's one thing that bugs him about going nude on camera. "Do I have to get naked? Yeah, absolutely fine," Mescal also said. "Do I want screenshots all over the internet? Probably not, but that's ultimately something I can't control."

Back in 2003, author James Frey made waves (in a bad way) when news broke that his "autobiography" about his struggles with addiction, titled "A Million Little Pieces," was largely fabricated; the fact that Oprah Winfrey chose the tome for her book club due to its raw emotionality certainly didn't help anything. Despite all of that, director Sam Taylor-Johnson decided to make a film adaptation in 2018 starring her husband Aaron Taylor-Johnson, which features a bizarre scene where the actor, playing Frey, dances naked while on a massive amount of drugs — and as the director revealed, she felt that the scene was incredibly vital to the film.

"I wanted the audience to know, very quickly, exactly who he was, without repeating imagery we've seen before," Taylor-Johnson told Backstage of her husband's character. "I said, 'You're a broken human being, and your behavior has to be so raw and without any boundaries or sense of self.' So, your nakedness, you have no sense of it being right or wrong. You have no shame. You have no anything, really.'" 

Still, she did say that when they needed to shoot the scene, everyone felt nervous: "Of course, when we shot it, it's like, 'Oh, god.'" Unfortunately for both Taylor-Johnsons, the movie received middling reviews — but nobody can say Aaron Taylor-Johnson didn't give it his all.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).