Actor Mary Elizabeth Winstead, like others in Hollywood, opted to include a no-nudity clause in her films. But she second-guessed the stipulation after watching one of Ryan Gosling’s darkest features.
The Ryan Gosling movie that challenged Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s no nudity clause
There was a point when Winstead was determined to avoid disrobing for the big screen. She asserted that this viewpoint slightly changed with age.
“When you’re starting out as an actress at a young age, you have a more self-righteous view of things, like, ‘I’ll never do that.’ Once you get older, you realize those things aren’t as important as you thought they were,” she once told Geek Chic.
Blue Valentine was one of the movies that made Winstead take another look at her no-nudity clause. The 2010 romance drama paired Gosling with actor Michelle Williams, and the two portrayed a married couple dealing with a looming break-up. The project featured a few intense love scenes between the two that fascinated Winstead.
“I have so much respect for many actresses who’ve done nudity. Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine is one of my favorite performances of the last few years. When I see something like that, I say, ‘OK, I totally understand why she did it,’” Winstead said.
Still, at the time, Winstead confided that it still wouldn’t be easy convincing her to do an explicit scene.
“It’s still something that I would be hard-pressed to say yes to. A lot of things would have to fall in line. It would have to be important to the story. I’m not the kind of person who’s just going to take her clothes off casually and be totally cool with it. But I am more open to it now,” she said.
How Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s no nudity clause impacted her career
Winstead has enjoyed a successful career in a wide range of genres. Some of her most memorable roles include Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Fargo. Despite her success, Winstead did share that refusing to be nude impacted some of her film opportunities. But not enough to significantly change her career’s trajectory.
“There’s certainly one or two things that I look back on from early in my career and I think, ‘Oh, man, if I had just been a little more open-minded, that would have been a really good thing to do.’ But at the same time, it wouldn’t have been right for me to do it then, because I wouldn’t have been comfortable with it,” Winstead said.
The actor seemed to stand by her past choices, and wouldn’t have done her career any other way.
“I definitely don’t have any regrets. Everything has to come at the right time; if I had done nudity at 19 or 20, I think it wouldn’t traumatized me. And who knows how that would have damaged my career, as a result. Even if it did limit me in certain aspects, that’s OK, because I got the roles that I was supposed to get,” she said.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead felt ‘Fargo’ helped her embrace her more sexual side
Winstead took on a role she was anxious to do in 2017’s Fargo. She co-starred alongside her husband Ewan McGregor in the film, and played a craftier role than she was normally seen portraying. Her character, Nikki Swango, was written and depicted as “sexy”. It was the type of character Winstead spent the majority of her career avoiding. But she admitted that doing Fargo helped Winstead embrace another side of herself.
“Sometimes you get in your head. I didn’t want to play these kinds of roles because I was like, ‘I don’t want to be seen that way,'” she said in a 2017 interview with Glamour. “’I don’t want to be seen as sexy because that’s not interesting or substantive.’ But then you get a role like this, where she’s sexy but she’s also a billion other things, and then you can really embrace that side of her and yourself and feel good about it.”
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