Alexander Skarsgård and His ‘Pillion’ Director on the Graphic, Cut Sex Scene Even They Didn’t Want You to See

[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Pillion.”]

Nine months after its Cannes Film Festival premiere, the oddly graceful and brazenly kinky queer romance “Pillion” is finally in mainstream U.S. theaters — in all its BDSM glory.

Writer/director Harry Lighton’s A24 release stars Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling as lovers on a dom-sub continuum, respectively, in London. It’s now in select theaters with no rating from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and, in bypassing the MPA, “Pillion” unfortunately surrenders more theaters and showtimes in order to arrive on screens intact and, well, uncut. (It already played a limited qualifying run in fall 2025 for awards consideration, and now seeks to tap into the Valentine’s box office alongside the similarly sexually unhinged, R-rated “Wuthering Heights.”)

The uninhabited, leather-clad (or not) sex scenes in “Pillion” — chains, gags, assless chaps, singlets, and all — are striking for a mainstream theatrical release. (Currently, the film is only on four screens.) Earlier in awards season, IndieWire spoke with writer/director Lighton, who adapts Adam Mars-Jones’ book “Box Hill,” who assured that no cuts were made to sex scenes for the sake of a safer rating. And that no one on the studio side demanded them, either.

Skarsgård had claimed on the festival circuit last year that the filmmakers shot “way more graphic scenes.” Lighton clarified that the scene Skarsgård referred to was the first blow job Colin (Melling) gives Ray (Skarsgård) in the alleyway after their Christmas Day date. That was almost quite a bit more explicit.

“I wouldn’t say that there were a lot more graphic scenes,” Lightson said. “There was specifically one shot and it was the bell end of the cock in close-up, looking down the barrel of the lens, erect with the focus on the Prince Albert. I loved the shot, and it was in the edit for ages. It was in the first sexual encounter in the alley when we used it, and it created a laugh in the wrong moment in that scene, a laugh when you needed the audience to be holding their breath from releasing. It was taken out to try to keep the tension. I never made a decision to take something out because I thought it was graphic. I was never told to take anything out. It was also based in trying to thread that line between honesty and [sexual] jump scare.”

So while that scene could have been a hell of a lot steamier, the way Lighton framed said blow job, it’s all about preserving the playful energy of Colin and Ray’s first time.

‘Pillion’Courtesy A24

Skarsgård is next to naked in the film — and also showed his erotic side once more in Sundance 2026’s “Wicker” as a sexually vigorous man woven literally from wood. The actor, in conversation with Lighton about that scene and more, added, “Harry never went for the shock values of those scenes. There was a version of this that could have been way more graphic, but it was important for all of us to have a balance. You don’t want to shy away from it, but you don’t want it to be too distracting where that becomes a thing, where it’s like, ‘Now they’re doing it just to get a reaction out of the audience.’ That takes you out of the narrative.”

That first scene, too, could have looked much different. Skarsgård said that while the film wasn’t shot “in sequence, those three pivotal moments — the first blow job, the first intercourse, the first orgasm — were shot in that order. The only one that we stopped to discuss on the day as we were shooting was the blow job. The other two kind of flowed naturally. The first one was tricky because the first time we shot it, it didn’t get aggressive, but it felt like Ray was a bit more assertive and forceful, grabbing Colin. Colin was gagging a bit more. We all kind of huddled after that … it’s important that it should be playful and exciting. You want to leave it the way it is in the edit now: Colin with cum on his face, smiling. … We definitely didn’t want the audience to feel like, ‘Jesus Christ, get away from that dude. That was abusive!’ We had to calibrate that scene. We wanted it to be intense and to be clear that Ray’s in charge … [but] we wanted it to be fumbling and weird from Colin’s point of view.”

“Pillion” deserves praise for its lack of restraint — there’s oral sex! anal sex! even torturously hot mental sex of the tantric sort! — and for its earnest dive into the fetish milieu of the Gay Bikers Motorcycle Club, from whom Ray hails. Where “The History of Sound” took a muted approach to queer intimacy, and “Call Me by Your Name” panned to a tree, Lighton said none of that while pitching the movie.

“I always felt like I wanted to leave it in the audience’s control to make their own judgment of the sex, and to me, if I am telling a story about kink, if I had pattered away from the sex scenes, that would be me casting judgment on the sex, and saying it’s something scandalous that needs to be kept out of the frame,” Lighton said. “It was my first instinct when I read the book and when I met with the producers, which is ‘I don’t want to tell a version of this story that is under the pressure to pan away.’ I might have used that shot in ‘Call Me by Your Name.’ I had to feel like it was looking directly at that world, and the sex within that world.”

“Pillion” is now in select theaters from A24.