Your sexuality doesn’t die with your age!
From Poldark’s glistening muscles and The Night Manager star Tom Hiddleston’s derriere to countless sex scenes in War And Peace, Sunday night TV has certainly been sexed up.
But while the latest offering is set to be no less steamy, the broadcaster is taking a rather different approach this time.
For the lead character involved in a raunchy liaison is not another strapping hunk or a young beauty but a middle-aged woman.
In Apple Tree Yard, Emily Watson, 50, plays 52 year old Dr Yvonne Carmichael, a normally straight-laced and highly successful scientist who embarks on a passionate and reckless affair.
Emily Watson and Ben Chaplin's in Apple Tree Yard. PICTURE: Instagram
And one lustful scene shows Yvonne ‘with her tights around her ankles’ enjoying a tryst with her lover Mark Costley, played by 47 year old Ben Chaplin, in a crypt below the House of Commons.
Miss Watson said: ‘Just the fact that the protagonist is a sexualised woman in her 50s is a good, feminist statement. This idea that female sexuality is the preserve of 22 year olds is just absurd.
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‘If anything, your sexuality blossoms during your late 40s and 50s.’ The mother of two explained that she and Chaplin discussed the scene in detail before they were filmed to ensure it was believable.
She told Stella magazine: ‘Ben and I decided that we were absolutely going to make those sex scenes look believable: really plot the sexual progress of our characters out beforehand, instead of just fumbling about the way you do when you’re younger.’
Speaking about her character, Miss Watson said: ‘I am 52. I have status and gravitas – when I don’t have my tights round my ankles in a secluded chapel beneath the Houses of Parliament, that is.’
fear makes animals of us all. #appletreeyard
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In a different interview with The Observer, Miss Watson discussed how actresses do not get shown in sex scenes once they reach a certain age, and said she thought she had reached that point.
She said: ‘I guess when I first read the script I thought “really?”
‘I mean I’ve been described in the press before as a character actor who gets laid, which I think is a great description, but as the years go by you get laid less and less on screen and then you sort of stop?...?And then suddenly here I am. It was pretty cool although I did have to kind of swallow a few times when I read the script.’
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Apple Tree Yard director Jessica Hobbs said she was pleased her four-part thriller addresses the issue of middle-aged sexuality head on.
She said: ‘I get offered a lot of relationship dramas but it’s very rare to find something that’s so central to the age you are and the experiences you’re having.
‘The appeal with Apple Tree Yard was that it’s a story about a woman of a certain age and I loved that because your sexuality doesn’t die with your age. You don’t have to apologise for it.’