There are tasteful nude scenes, and then there are nude scenes that leave a bad taste in your mouth. You know, the kind of scenes that make you wonder what on earth convinced the filmmakers that your moviegoing experience would not be complete until you saw an actor baring it all. A scene like that can ruin the entire movie.
Below we will examine cinema’s most cringe-worthy nude scenes, so that you won’t have to. They run the gamut from a heroine performing household chores in her birthday suit to a wildly inappropriate use of butter. Some are simply scenes of gratuitous nudity that exist purely to titillate members of the audience (because nothing puts butts in seats like the exposed butts of attractive Hollywood stars). Others are either too disturbing to watch, or unintentionally hilarious. All of them have one thing in common: These scenes have shown so much skin that it’s impossible for viewers to un-see them.
Halle Berry sunbathing in Swordfish
Warner Bros.
This moment from “Swordfish” is one of the most famous examples of gratuitous nudity and maybe the costliest. As if it wasn’t enough that an earlier scene in the film showed Stanley (Hugh Jackman) hacking into the Department of Defense while a girl gave him a blowjob, the movie decides to show femme fatale Ginger (Halle Berry) sunbathing topless while reading a book.
Director Dominic Sena allegedly put a little extra in Berry’s paycheck in exchange for flashing her breasts. Sena claimed that Berry was reluctant at first to go nude until he offered her a $500,000 bonus for it. Of course, Berry insisted in a later interview Sena was just being flippant when he said that. Instead, said Berry, she agreed to strip down for the role not because of money but because she felt confident enough to film a nude scene for the first time in her career. “With the success of my Dorothy Dandridge project and the critical acclaim that brought me,” she told Entertainment Weekly, “I finally felt that I didn’t have to prove myself anymore.”
Regardless of how much this nude scene cost, it added nothing to the movie. It would have made no difference if the scene had shown Berry fully dressed (or at least wearing a bikini top).
Later that year, Berry agreed to do a more tasteful and impactful nude scene — “Monster’s Ball” made much better use of her naked body.
