Joanna Lumley: 'Sex scenes bore me rigid – they're rude and horrible'

"The second you take your clothes off, the audience looks at you, the actor, and your attributes – what your breasts and genitals are like," she explained.

Lumley previously wrote in her 2004 memoir (as per The Guardian): "Oh, everybody stripped... we all had to take at least our tops off in something.

"It was standard, and it was this, 'You're not a real actress unless you take your top off.'"

"Nobody liked it, like nobody likes intimate kissing or sex scenes," she told The Guardian. "All this ghastly stuff we have to pretend to do."

"You've immediately lost the character you've built," she told Radio Times magazine. "There's a playground element to it – pull your pants down and let's see what you’ve got.

"I'd cut them altogether. They slow things down. They're rude and horrible. I don't watch people on the lavatory!"

Lumley's hatred for sex scenes is no secret, with the actress previously revealing that she finds them "intolerable".

"I think they're revolting," she said during an interview on Talk TV. "I don't know why people write them, and I don't know why we watch them."

Over the course of her career, Lumley has hit out at the times she had to film raunchy scenes in her early career.

"You do it with hatred. Not hatred, but sort of sullenly," she told The Guardian.

When asked if she felt it was exploitative, Lumely said: "Oh, it always is. But there are lots of other things you have to do in life which are horrible, and you never wanted to do them, and you find yourself caught up with them... It was a different world."

Read the full interview with Joanna Lumley in this week's issue of Radio Times.

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