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Sex Education’s Aimee Lou Wood had ‘vulnerability hangover’ after filming masturbation scene

Actor said ‘so many worries were ignited’ by the scene

Isobel Lewis
Monday 08 February 2021 08:49 GMT
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Sex Education star says she thought masturbation ‘was only a boy thing’

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Aimee Lou Wood says that she had a “vulnerability hangover” after filming a masturbation montage for Sex Education.

Wood stars in the Netflix teen drama as Aimee Gibbs, who in season one learns to masturbate for the first time in an energetic and explicit montage scene.

Appearing on the Make it Reign with Josh Smith podcast, the actor revealed that while the scene had initially “ignited many worries”, she’d come to love the finished product.

“The intimacy co-ordinator said sometimes you’ll feel pretty exhilarated after you’ve just done the sex scene, then a day or two later you get a bit of a vulnerability hangover and you’re like, ‘s***’,” Wood recalled.

“So she checks in on us a day or two after we’ve filmed it to see how we’re feeling. With the scene, I was so supported on set. But a couple of days later I was like, ‘Oh my god!’”

Read more: Ncuti Gatwa: 'I've almost been beaten up for saying I'm Scottish'

She continued: “So many worries were ignited. I had a major vulnerability hangover. I was like, ‘I look hideous, my a** in the air, so unflattering’. 

“But I’m so happy it was like that and not airbrushed, flattering angles. Now I look back at that and think, ‘Wow, great!’”

Season three of Sex Education has been one of the many casualties of the pandemic, with the show originally expected to return in January 2021 (as the previous two seasons had).

Production was able to start in September after being delayed from April, but no release date has currently been announced for the new episodes.

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In his four-star review of season two, The Independent’s Ed Cumming said that Sex Education was “a schooling not just in sex, but in comedy”.

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