Helen Hunt, completely nude in The Sessions

Helen Hunt, completely nude in The Sessions

Helen Hunt plays a sex surrogate who transforms a paralysed man’s life, she overcame her inhibitions because she wanted to be part of such a beautiful story

Helen Hunt: ‘Being naked was nerve-racking’

Helen Hunt Nude – The Sessions (2012)

Being naked is nerve-racking because you can always think of some way in which your body should be different. But The Sessions is a story about vulnerability. My job [as Cheryl] is to let Mark see that I’m totally OK with his disabilities. When people watch the film they think: ‘Oh, we’re going to see Helen Hunt naked.’ Well, by the time I come on screen, they’re terrified I’m going to get undressed, they’re not titillated, because they know that this woman is going to make a move on this man who is so courageous. They are thinking how Mark has taken such a big risk, rather than, ‘Oh, there are two actors with their private parts showing.’
There is nothing erotic about the sex scenes. It is just me trying to get John’s shirt off because his character couldn’t move his arm which was stiff [from the polio]. I’m thinking, ‘Am I going to be able to do this physically? What if I can’t get the shirt off?’ I can’t tell you how challenging it was. Just like real sex, it very quickly came down to the not-so-sexy nuts and bolts of how do you get two bodies close to each other, especially if only one of them can move? The crew went out of their way to give us our privacy. We only had five or six people in the room and they were doing most of their work looking away.

The Sessions is a movie about sex. I don’t think it is a movie about love. That’s what makes it so unique. Mark says to Cheryl, ‘I feel like I’m behind a pane of glass and everyone on the other side is getting to eat at a banquet that I will never taste.’ That’s how he felt, so sex was important to him.

In this movie, two people come together to serve the needs of one of them. I have not seen that in
a movie before.
Sex seems like it’s a pretty fundamental part of life. Some people as they get older choose not to play any more and I don’t really know about that because I’m not at that moment in my life. I guess it is important. We all talk about it a lot.

In the 80s I had a moment of thinking, ‘Ugh, should I be thinner? How do I look in these trousers?’ There were times I thought, ‘To hell with trying on the bathing suit,’ when I and all the other 20-year-old actresses were auditioning for everything. But that’s a dangerous neighbourhood to get into and one day I just resigned from it. I said, ‘I don’t care what size I’m going to be.’ Your life could be devoted to some version of hell and I was not willing to live in hell, so I just bailed out of exercising for the sake of exercising – and out of any kind of dieting. I only do exercise that I love [yoga] and eat food that I love. I’m afraid to even talk about it in case it all crashes in on me and I start worrying about it again.
I don’t have time to get dressed up and I don’t care. I get up at 5.45 in the morning. I feed the dog, feed the cat, make breakfast, make lunch for my daughter and then we do half an hour of piano practice together and half an hour of reading. I drop her off at school, write a little bit, have a meeting and go to yoga. So when would I have the time to put on a skirt and a matching blouse? That’s just not happening.

Part of me wishes that I’d started having children earlier and had four of them. But that’s not the reality. I had to fight like a wild animal to get pregnant with my daughter; I went through a lot of rigorous fertility stuff. I think I have more appreciation of motherhood having had my daughter later. But the upside is that I’m a better person now than I was when I was 20-something. I’m not perfectly patient all the time, but I don’t say, ‘Ugh, I’ve got to pick up my kid at three o’clock.’ The fact that I get to pick up my daughter is great – it’s rare that I roll my eyes.
I feel lucky to have a beautiful family. I love all those simple Sunday trips going to a farmers’ market, getting burritos and sitting on the grass eating. I love Sunday dinners with my father and his wife. These things are not really that exciting, but they have a lot of meaning for me, and I’m assuming they mean a lot to our children too.
Being a stepmum is kind of calculus parenting, as in more complicated parenting. With my daughter I do my best to figure out what’s right for her. With my stepson I like to think of myself in some fairy-godmother position; I’m just hovering around, wishing him and everyone in the family well and chiming in when I’m asked. He’s very lucky that he has four great parents.
I had a pretty normal upbringing. I wasn’t on a TV series that took me out of school; I would just leave for a month here and there. It was fun and it wasn’t completely insane because I went to a regular school and had normal friends. I grew up in an artistic community in New York, so we often went to museums and to the theatre. I went to an acting class because my aunt was in one and I enjoyed it; the next thing you know I had an agent.
I was bitten by acting. I put in 20,000 hours of acting classes and improvisation, Shakespeare workshops and productions of obscure plays as a kid because I loved theatre. And it worked out well for me. But there are brilliant actors, including John Hawkes, who never had any formal acting training. Some people don’t need to put in all that time.
The Oscar does not make it easier to get good roles as a woman. Great parts don’t grow on trees. When you find a film like The Sessions you have to grab it. I have some resistance to saying it’s hard for women in Hollywood, because that’s depressing, but also because there aren’t a lot of great soulful parts written for men either. But things are supposed to wax and wane, that’s how life works. I had a daughter and I found it incredibly compelling to be some version of a stay-at-home mother. It’s not as simple as saying that I’ve turned down brilliant parts for her. If I’d got the best part in the world that meant shooting for four months in Prague, I’m not sure what I would have done. I never felt like one of those mums you hear about who throw their children on the plane with them and off they go.

My 22-year-old goddaughter [her friend’s daughter] is sort of my third kid. I have made her my Executive In Charge of Twitter. I like to tweet and I secretly get a little help from her. I would not say I’m a dynamic tweeter; I was not on the ground in Egypt covering the changing regime, for example – I do it for fun. I tweet about travelling and I had a pro-Obama tweet before the election.
I’m looking forward to being 50 and a day and seeing that the world didn’t fall apart. That’ll be nice. I don’t know what it’s going to be like, but life’s really good and I’ve got this beautiful movie so I feel hopeful in terms of my creative future. I would love it if nobody knew how old I am, but those days are gone. Plastic surgery? I’m not going to say never, but I don’t think so. I think I may have had enough needles poking me when I had my fertility treatment to last a lifetime. But you never know.

Helen Hunt

Helen Hunt

Famous For:

• Married to Hank Azaria (Voice of Moe & Cheif Wiggum on “The Simpsons” (1999-2000)
• “Swiss Family Robinson” (1975-1976)
• “St Elsewhere” (1984-1986)
• “As Good As It Gets” (1997)
• “Mad About You” (1992-1999)
• “Pay It Forward” (2000)
• “The Sessions” (2012)