Too hot to handle! As Olivia Pope’s illicit lover on ABC’s Scandal, Tony Goldwyn has filmed some pretty racy sex scenes with costar Kerry Washington. But as he revealed on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Monday, Dec. 1, even he was a little shocked by the script for episode seven of season four, which called for President Fitzgerald Grant to tell Olivia, in graphic detail over the phone, all the naughty things he wanted to do to her.
“There’s a lot of sex scenes,” said DeGeneres, whose wife, Portia de Rossi, joined the political drama this season. “A lot of people have to do lots of things on that show.”
“Mostly me,” Goldwyn, a married father of two, replied, laughing. “And Scott [Foley].”
“And Kerry, last time she was here, said she didn’t like doing it with either of you,” DeGeneres joked of the Emmy-nominated actress. (“I don’t enjoy either one,” Washington said in September when the talk show host asked who was the better kisser.)
“I plugged my ears. I actually didn’t hear that,” Goldwyn quipped back. “I knew it was going to come out of her mouth, and I just [plugged my ears]. First of all, I don’t believe her. So let’s just say that.”
DeGeneres then brought up the phone sex scene from the Nov. 6 episode, saying, “That’s gotta be even harder. Because you’re just by yourself with a phone.”
The Ghost actor, 54, agreed, telling his host, “It really took me by surprise…Of course, as you know, on Scandal we never get the scripts until we all sit down together, usually the day before shooting, and read them out loud together. So I’m reading this script totally blind, and I get to this scene…and it was really hot! And pretty out there — I could not believe they aired that on ABC.”
It was so hot, in fact, that Goldwyn couldn’t help blushing as he read the scene in front of his costars. “I went bright red in the table read…and doing phone sex was actually in a way harder than doing a regular sex scene,” he shared. “Because a regular sex scene, it’s all so weird and ridiculous, and you have this other person that you’re with. But for [the phone sex scene], it was me, alone on the phone, actually having phone sex with someone, and just the crew watching me!”
One crew member, an assistant camera operator named Emily, was just a couple of feet away. “She’s sitting right next to me, kind of looking at me,” he recalled, laughing, “and I was like, ‘Emily, I’m really embarrassed.'”
