While female actors have been doing full-frontal nude scenes in film for years, it’s rare that a male actor will do the same. But there’s a handful of stars who have bared it all by going full frontal in the name of art … and sometimes humor.
Bradley Cooper is the most recent A-lister to go nude for the sake of his craft. He called his scene in 2021’s Nightmare Alley “a big deal” during an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, as he’s seen fully naked from the front and side while in a bathtub, engaging in a sex act with actress Toni Collette‘s character.
“I remember reading in the script and thinking, ‘He’s a pickled punk in that bathtub and it’s to story. You have to do it,’” he recalled. “I can still remember that day just to be naked in front of the crew for six hours, and it was Toni Collette’s first day. It was just like, ‘Whoa.’ It was pretty heavy.”
The eight-time Oscar nominee said that he didn’t hesitate about baring it all for the scene “because there was nothing gratuitous about it. It was to story.”
Ewan McGregor has appeared full frontal so many times in films that he’s got all his peers beat. But as for showing his goods in films such as Trainspotting and Velvet Goldmine, “It’s all about life,” the actor told the U.K.’s Express in 2011, adding, “We’re naked at the end of the day, and we’re sometimes naked in the middle of the day — if we’re lucky.”
Ben Affleck was given some sage advice from his Gone Girl director, David Fincher, when it came to his now infamous nude shower scene in 2014. “David said to me from the beginning, ‘This is a warts-and-all movie. It can have no vanity. You have to see the naked underbelly of this character. It’s gotta be like in Europe; they just don’t give a s—t about any of that stuff and they just play real people.’ [So] there is some brief, very brief nudity,” he told MTV News while promoting the film.
But his interviewer, Josh Horowitz, then snarked, “We’re selling this on the penis!” to which Ben replied, “The penis is in there!” He went on to joke, “It costs extra. It’s IMAX penis! You’ve gotta pay 15 bucks to see it in 3-D. It looks better in 3-D.” But it came with a caveat, as Ben noted about how the temperature during filming might have affected his naked and exposed body. “It was a very cold set. It was freezing. It was subzero,” he added.
Scroll down for actors who have bared it all in full-frontal movie scenes.