Fifty Shades of Gray author EL James had a specific person in mind to help her choreograph sex scenes for the film adaptation of her 2015 bestselling book.
in one new interview with TodayJames revealed that she had her husband, Niall Leonard, hand in hand with planning the torrid scenes between Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) and Christian Gray (Jamie Dornan)… all while they were cramped in the back seat of their Mini Cooper.
“I said, ‘Okay, I’ll sit on your lap,'” said the 60-year-old author of the BDSM-inspired franchise novels, recounting the instructions she gave her husband.
James noted that the couple stayed “fully clothed” but “people down the street went to the soccer field” while choreographing the scenes on a Saturday afternoon.
“They were like, ‘What are these two doing?'” she added of the bystanders who spotted her.
Similar to James’ novel Fifty Shades of Grey, the 2015 film adaptation follows a literature student, Anastasia Steele, whose “Life changes forever when she meets handsome but troubled billionaire Christian Grey.”
The popular movie spawned two sequels: 2017’s Fifty Shades Darker and 2018’s Fifty Shades Freed, which is shaping up to be one of the most lucrative franchises in Universal history.
As early as July 2022, Johnson spoke to Vanity Fair about how she clashed with James during filming.
She said James exercised “a lot of creative control all day, every day” over the film’s production and “demanded certain things to happen,” she exclaimed Her experience working with James was a “struggle.”
“There were parts of the books that just wouldn’t work in a movie, like the inner monologue that was incredibly cheesy at times,” Johnson said. “It wouldn’t work to say it out loud. It was always a struggle. Always.”
She went on to explain that she and director Sam Taylor-Johnson rewrote certain scenes sometime the night before filming began.
“That’s why we did the takes of the film [James] wanted to do, and then we would do the takes of the film We wanted to do,” Johnson shared. “It was like chaos the whole time.”