Glen Powell and Adria Arjona battled through painful rashes to film their Hit Man sex scenes.
“The day that we filmed all of our sex scenes — all of them with a crazy rash,” Arjona, 32, recalled on the Thursday, May 23, episode of the “Just for Variety” podcast. “We were both in so much pain. We would just die laughing, ‘How much makeup do you have on your ass right now?’ I was like, ‘So much, it’s not even funny.’”
She continued, “We had fun because it was so funny. We were both in pain with makeup all over this rash and it was funny.”
Arjona stars as Madison in Hit Man, which premieres in select theaters later this week and is about a professor named Gary (Powell) working undercover with the New Orleans police department. In the middle of Gary’s secretive work, he falls for suspect Madison after she hires him to murder her abusive husband.
In one of Gary and Madison’s steamy scenes, they share an intimate moment in a bathtub.
“We soaked in this bathtub for an hour, and I get out of the tub and all of a sudden I dry myself and I can’t bend my knees because I have no oils,” Arjona told Variety, noting that a crew member added Dawn dish soap to the water that exacerbated the rash symptoms. “[It] strips you of all your oils of your skin. That’s used for baby ducks when there’s an oil spill, for God’s sake.”
Powell, 35, cowrote Hit Man with the film’s director, Richard Linklater, using the romantic scenes to show Gary’s evolution as a character.
“I think what’s interesting about those [sex] scenes is that they’re not there just to say, ‘Oh, now they’re a couple,’” Powell previously told IndieWire in January. “It’s the exploration of Gary not being in his head, and by putting on this other identity, he’s actually better at this thing than he thought he would be.”
He continued at the time, “I thought the process of how we found the sex scenes in the movie — remember, we found an impressionistic approach, like pieces of art. Like there’s an old painting or a photograph, and we kinda went, ‘What about this do we like? As much as this is a fantasy for Gary, it’s a fantasy for [Madison]. And you have to have the female gaze on that sex scene. So we really team-sported it to show images that we got excited about, things you’ve never seen before. Because that’s the thing: Sex scenes can be kinda paint-by-numbers and so boring and so ineffective.”
Throughout the sex scenes, Powell acted as a “gentleman” toward Arjona.
“Glen is the best costar anyone could ask for. He’s so gracious and such a gentleman and is curious. And he doesn’t like winning on his own,” she gushed to Variety. “He likes winning in a team. When you’re an actor and you’re in a scene with another actor and you’re doing romantic movies and romantic scenes, you need someone that wants to win with you, and Glen is the definition of that. “
Hit Man debuts in select theaters on Friday, May 24, and will be available to stream on Netflix beginning Friday, June 7.
