How to Get Away With Undressing Viola Davis! That’s actor Billy Brown’s task every Thursday night on ABC’s new hit thriller How to Get Away With Murder. The hunky detective Nate Lahey is also the lover of lawyer Annalise Keating (Davis, 49) and the two share some steamy sex scenes on the Shonda Rhimes-produced series.
“When you’re there doing it, it’s even more [sexy],” Brown told Us Weekly at the cast’s roundtable in Los Angeles on Monday, Jan. 26. “You can see everything and the flesh and the hands, the lips and the perfume, but when they edit it and it’s artistic and beautiful, you aren’t seeing as much!”
Though he wouldn’t give any more spoilers for the second half of the first season, which premieres on Thursday, Jan. 29, he did admit, “There’s more skin, more flesh for sure!”
When it comes to the racier scenes on the series, Brown revealed that Davis gets into them just as much as he does.
“Viola will say, ‘Be sure you grab my ass,’ and I’ll say, ‘Only if you grab mine!’” he joked on how they choreograph the raunchy moments. “As long as those scenes are laid out, we’re ready to work together.”
Brown has tons of respect for his costar, who just won a SAG Award for her role on the smash hit drama.
“She is really smart, and she’s cool — no attitude,” he said. “There’s no diva vibe with her. She’s like real people, and you can see it in her work. The choices she makes in this show reflect her heart in real life.”
While the cast agrees Davis is down-to-earth and great to work with, her costars Aja Naomi King (who plays Michaela Pratt) and Karla Souza (who plays Laurel Castillo), admitted they were intimidated their first time on set.
“When I first met her, I was terrified! I was like, ‘It’s Viola Davis!’” King, 30, admitted. “We were outside in the cold, and she’s cracking jokes in the cold, making everyone feel light and happy and totally welcome.”
Souza, 29, said that sometimes she still gets nervous around her Oscar-nominated costar.
“But then she’s just like, resting, and you think, ‘She’s going to kill me – oh my God, I did something wrong, I said something wrong’ – her just being, her resting face, she is mad at me,” Souza explained. “It’s terrifying. It did take me, I have to say, about five months, to think, ‘Maybe she doesn’t want to kill me!’ So I have been terrified of her and then this last month for whatever reason she’s been more relaxed with me and I’ve just been like, ‘Okay! Okay, we got to this point!’”
How to Get Away With Murder airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET on ABC.