As the title might suggest, “a Good Old Fashioned Orgy” posed quite a tall order, performance-wise, for its comic cast — which includes Jason Sudeikis, Tyler Labine, Angela Sarafyan and Lindsay Sloane, along with Nick Kroll, Lake Bell, Will Forte, Martin Starr and Lucy Punch. But being total pros, the actors didn’t bat an eye at getting intimate with each other — to a point.
“All right, you guys. I didn’t show my ass,” admits Sloane. “I showed everything else. I gave you enough side boobs to equal an ass!” But any anxiety she avoided by not baring her bottom on film was quickly replaced but a completely different type of anxiety: “Jason Sudeikis tried to tell me that I’m sending a very bad message if I don’t show my own ass because it’s teaching girls to have poor self body image,” she says.
The process of finding a body double for Sloane proved to be more than a little taxing, as well. “It’s horrible where you have to choose a body double,” she says. “The producers pointed out one girl and I almost started crying. I just thought, ‘Oh my God! I know I have body dysmorphia, and that’s how they see me, too?’”
Of course, nudity wasn’t the only thing weighing on the minds of the cast members. With nearly every member of the ensemble having a reputation for comic scene-stealing in other projects, a certain level of performance anxiety surfaced during production. “There was another set of insecurities at play, too, that we all came to terms with halfway through the shoot,” Labine remembers. “In the beginning the bits and being funny all the time was f—ing exhausting. Gradually, everyone started admitting that we all felt like we were the unfunny one in the group.”
An orgy of love
So what’s the key to creating chemistry between a large cast quickly? Lubrication. “We got brought to North Carolina about two weeks before we started production,” says Labine. “So we had ample time to get to know each other before we started shooting. There was much, much alcohol in those early weeks.”
That bonding paid off, as the film’s climax was a daunting proposition for many involved. “I found it to be really great to become real friends and then have that part at the end,” says Sarafyan. “There were things we had to do that were very challenging in terms of the orgy, and I felt very supported when we were doing them because they are a very generous group of people there looking out for each other.”
But all of that bonding had a downside, too, for some of the cast: “It actually, in turn, made it more uncomfortable because we legitimately fell in love with each other,” says Sloane. “It was kind of a very well-choreographed dance that we had to do where you were covering bits and pieces, but the people that you were already so close with are legitimately seeing your bits and pieces because they have to. I get a lot closer with Nick Kroll’s thigh than I ever thought I would.”
