10 Famous Nude Scenes That Are Actually Fake Plots

Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman

While many people know that Julia Roberts’s legs on the poster for Pretty Woman aren’t actually her own, neither are many of her body parts in the film’s opening montage, which depicts her hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold preparing for another surprisingly respectable night on the street corner.
“There’s a reason why you don’t see me naked me in movies, you don’t see me running around in bathing suits in movie”, Roberts told Us Magazine. “It’s just not my thing.”
In fact, Roberts’s more explicit on-camera work was supplied by model and actress Shelley Michelle, who has been dubbed ‘the most famous body double in Hollywood.’
”My legs were a little curvier [than Roberts’s], I was a little more busty,” Michelle told the Orlando Sentinel. ”It made her look a little more curvaceous, just gave her that body she needed.”
She also revealed that she never understood the controversy over her hiring once it became public knowledge.
“There have been stunt people in Hollywood forever. But I suppose when this Cinderella movie came out and everybody loved it so much, when they found out it wasn’t really her body, they felt cheated by not really seeing the girl. But my feeling is that movies are a fantasy, and just an illusion anyway.”

Kim Basinger in My Stepmother Is an Alien/Final Analysis

Anne Archer in Body of Evidence

Fatal Attraction housewife and noteworthy Scientologist Anne Archer caused a ruckus in 1993 by telling reporters that her nude scenes in the cataclysmic Madonna flop Body of Evidence were all part of a sexy mid-life makeover.
“I hit 40 and boy, the last three movies, the sex scenes I got,” Archer giggled. “Life’s changing, what can I tell you? Forty’s wonderful.”
The problem was that all of Archer’s nudity was in fact performed for $700 by body double Shawn Lusader, who angrily went to the press claiming Archer was taking credit for her work.
“The industry is set up for her to do that. It allows her to misrepresent herself. She gets to enhance her career and I don’t,” Lusader told the Chicago Tribune. “We don’t get any credit. They want us to do our job and keep quiet.”
While it’s unusual for somebody to actually want to have Body of Evidence on their resume, Lusader went on to attempt to launch a rights organisation called The Body of Doubles in retaliation, which argued that body doubles should be credited as film extras.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, Madonna dismissed the offer of body doubles for her sex scenes in the candlewax-crazed erotic disaster.

Drew Barrymore in Poison Ivy

For the coming-of-age erotica Poison Ivy, Drew Barrymore declined to perform nude scenes, despite the film’s promotion material capitalising on her just-turned-18 notoriety and post-teen rehab woes.
“Those breasts are not mine,” she told Movieline. “I was a little nervous about doing it in the first place and the company just felt it would be better. Those shots were only supposed to be for European distribution, so I thought: no problem. But now they’re in both versions and, well, no offense to the girl, but I have prettier boobs than she does. I’m pretty bummed that America’s gonna think those are mine.”
To confuse matters, Barrymore’s Poison Ivy nude scenes have often been attributed to actress Jaime Pressly, now best known for roles in sitcoms My Name Is Earl and Mom. But Pressly confirmed in 2007 that she in fact merely posed for still photographs that were used as props for Poison Ivy 2, which saw Alyssa Milano’s virginal college student embrace the sexual deviant within after discovering nude selfies and diary entries that once belonged to the first film’s sexually uninhibited heroine.
Pressly herself was the lead in 1997’s Poison Ivy: The New Seduction, further confusing dedicated fans of the long-running Poison Ivy franchise.

Leslie Mann and Olivia Wilde in The Change-Up

Jessica Alba in Machete

 

Another CGI nudity fest occurred one year earlier in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete. While shooting a shower scene in the B-movie spoof, Alba in fact wore white underwear, which was then digitally erased later on. It sparked a brief debate about the future of cinematic nudity, while Alba’s publicist released a somewhat stern statement on the matter: “Jessica has been steadfast in her resolve not to appear nude in films from the beginning of her career. The decision to digitally remove the underwear from the shower scene in Machete was one she and Robert Rodriguez made together, which would serve his vision for the film, as well as honor her personal convictions regarding nudity. She is very proud of the film and stands by the creative decisions she and Robert made about this scene.”
Hilariously, it’s not only Alba’s body that has been digitally enhanced, but her acting skills. For 2005’s Fantastic Four, director Tim Story told Alba not to cry real tears for a particularly weepy moment of the maligned comic book adaptation, and that they’d just CGI them in during post-production.
“Are my instincts and my emotions not good enough?” Alba complained to Elle Magazine. “Do people hate them so much that they don’t want me to be a person? And so I just said, F— it. I don’t care about this business anymore.”

Natalie Portman in Your Highness

While Natalie Portman has performed sexually explicit scenes in Oscar fare like Closer and Black Swan, she shockingly balked at performing sexy scenes in a bawdy stoner comedy featuring a minotaur with an enormous prosthetic penis. For 2011’s medieval laugher Your Highness, an Irish student named Caroline Davies was paid £250 for a scene in which Portman’s character, wearing a thong, is glimpsed leaping into a lake.
“I got a phone call completely out of the blue from an extras firm saying they wanted me to come in,” she told the Belfast Telegraph. “Then they asked me to go down to the Titanic Quarter to see if I could act as Natalie’s body-double. I’m a film studies student, so I jumped at the chance to be on set.
“They took me to a small pool and I had to train how to jump into water only three or four metres deep, which is really hard because it’s shallow. It was hard work, but worth it — I’ll definitely recognise myself on screen when it comes out.”

Keira Knightley in Domino

Speaking to Jonathan Ross in 2011, the British actress revealed that she has a very specific nudity policy, one that favours the top half of her body. “I say, ‘You can have the top half but you can’t have the bottom half’, and it kind of works quite well,” she revealed.
So, for a scene in her dismal Tony Scott action movie Domino in which her character performs a striptease, Knightley requested a butt double.
“I said, ‘Could you get me a bottom please?’ And so I went into a room with Tony Scott, the director, and these three women came in and just dropped their trousers and he was like, ‘Well, which one do you want?’ And how do you say to the bottom double, do you say, ‘Well I don’t want that one, that one’s crap’, well obviously you don’t because the woman’s standing there. You can’t be rude.
“I was just looking for one that’s around the same shape as mine, just a bit better. So there was one that was really amazing and I was like, ‘No one’s going to believe that’. The girl we picked had a lovely bottom.”
In weirder Keira Knightley body double trivia, she also hired one for Atonement. Not for her rear end again, but rather for her feet.

Angie Dickinson in Dressed to Kill

Dressed to Kill’s opening act is a masterclass in high-tension Hitchcock mimickry, with a lonely Manhattan housewife indulging in sexual fantasies and illicit affairs before being horrifically killed in an elevator. But it’s the very first scene that is particularly scandalous: a sex dream depicting Angie Dickinson, left at the mercy of a particularly pervy camera, as she soaps herself in the shower before being raped by an intruder.
The especially graphic nudity (something that lead to adult film star Ron Jeremy publicly decrying the hypocrisy that Dressed to Kill received a mainstream release while his work is deemed pornographic) was in fact the work of a Penthouse model named Victoria Lynn Johnson. While Dickinson, then the star of pioneering TV cop drama Police Woman, at first played up her newly sexual image in the press, she was annoyed when director Brian De Palma confessed that it wasn’t actually her in the shower.
“I was shocked the movie company admitted it,” she told People Magazine in 1980. “Why destroy the illusion? Let them think it’s Tahiti, even if it is Burbank.”