Kaya Scodelario refused ‘Skins’ spin-off sex scenes: “There’s no need to do that”

Kaya Scodelario has said that she refused to do sex scenes in a Skins spin-off as she believed they were unnecessary.

The actress rose to prominence playing Effy Stonem on the late ’00s teen drama, who became the show’s lead character in its third season.

After the show ended in 2010, she starred in spin-off ‘conclusion’ miniseries three years later, Skins: Fire, following Effy’s life working for a City hedge fund. Now that she was an adult, the writers attempted to make the content of the show more graphic, which she then pushed back on as she felt there wasn’t a need to make it more explicit.

“I felt much more confident in saying what I felt during that series,” she told The Guardian. “When the first draft came through, there were a lot of sex scenes in it, and I could tell it was because I turned 18, and that meant that they could show more. And I went back and said: ‘No, there’s no need to do that.’”

Scodelario said that she advocates for younger actors on sets as much as possible and praised them for stressing the importance of intimacy coordinators. “Nothing too awful ever happened [on the set of Skins], thank God, but it could have, and I think that’s what’s scary about it,” she said. “What’s wonderful now is that every production is aware that a sex scene is essentially a stunt, and it should be choreographed.”

Scodelario spoke positively on the atmosphere on set for the majority of the original series. It was where she met some of her closest friends and co-star Daniel Kaluuya became godfather to her son.

“It’s a really loving group,” she said. “Sometimes you don’t get that with actors. You get competition.” Not with the Skins lot. “It’s like, how was that shoot? Are you feeling all right? Are you taking enough time off? And how’s your back?”

She also praised how the show handled difficult storylines, such as Effy’s struggles with her mental health. “It wasn’t an episode of Byker Grove where someone takes drugs and then they die and everyone’s like: ‘Let’s never do that again.’ I think that’s what the magic of Skins was.”

In other news, her co-star Dev Patel said earlier this month that the show is “the little rash that won’t go away”.

It played a major role in getting his career off the ground, as he explained in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, however he also quipped that it is a show that he is constantly asked about still, despite leaving it 16 years ago.

“Skins was like – oh boy, it’s kind of like the little rash that won’t go away,” he said. “No, no, no. Look, man, it was amazing. You look at the guys that have come out of that – Nick Hoult, Kaya Scodelario – [and] it’s really amazing.”

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