Homicide Stories: Hot Coffin Sex and 11 Cents. Part 2

The fun continues...

Some understanding, please!

Emma’s apartment.

That is pure Art Department and Set Dressing mastery, right there. When we shot this, John McNaughton, the director, had a big chunk of time to film it in. We could explore, take our time, and get to know each other. In those days there were no intimacy coordinators. We didn’t have a stunt coordinator on the set because it was written as a straightforward seduction.

Lauren and I had talked beforehand about how quickly we needed to be into each other physically and how much fun it would be to use her entire apartment like a sweaty, human pinball machine. It was already set up with an eye towards temptation, with all these miniature crime scenes everywhere; we knew where we needed to eventually end up, the camera would follow wherever we went, so we just tried shit out.

Lauren was very confident in her physicality. Our disparate sizes suited the comedy of the situation as I could easily carry her, and swing her around. Lauren was up for it all. There was tripping, falling, kissing, groping, clothes being torn off - but, we never were in danger of hurting each other. Every movement was part of a building hunger, an animated grindfest spurred on by the specter of death, and that black serpent wrapped around what looked like a large egg with a nipple.

I developed quite a crush on Lauren. Her combination of beauty, humor, intelligence, love of acting, and fearlessness was breathtaking. “Bayliss and Zoole”, was a dream come true for me. Up until then I hadn’t had a love scene or been cast as a ‘love interest’. That just wasn’t my jam. But, you cast Lauren Tom as a character with a crime-art, death obsession, and a coffin - and I’ll do TV lovemaking with the best of them.

I had known Lauren from two or three years before. My agent brought me to a party at her apartment with all sorts of young Hollywood types. They thought she and I would be a good match. But, for whatever reason we didn’t hit it off that way. Cut to a couple of years later and, at least as our characters, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.

When I found out Lauren had been cast it was a huge relief. We wouldn’t be entirely unknown to each other, so that period of awkwardness was minimized and in very short order we jumped at the chance to ravish each other in her boudoir.

That scene in her apartment was the first hint of that freedom; the energy was flying off the charts. Our bodies, lips, and hands were mindlessly wrapped all over each other as we bounced crazily toward our inevitable sex astride the grave. Or as Emma would whisper in a nod to Buddhism, “Breathing without breathing.”