Filming That Polysexual Sense8 Orgy Scene

While Sense8 — a story about strangers who become emotionally and mentally linked — spans five continents in telling the stories of eight characters over 12 episodes, there’s only one scene everyone can talk about: That orgy involving Jamie Clayton, Miguel Ángel Silvestre, Brian Smith, and Max Riemelt in episode six or, as Silvestre dubs it, “episode sex.”

In an extremely powerful moment, several of the show’s main characters connect in a passionate embrace that crosses both gender and sexuality. A gay man, a transgender lesbian, and two straight men kiss, suck, and thrust, until they all share an orgasmic moment.

It’s erotic, beautiful — with Fat Boy Slim (feat. Macy Gray)’s “Demons” serving as the scene’s soundtrack — and very much in tune with Andy and Lana Wachowski signature filming style. The creative duo behind the Matrix franchise and Cloud Atlas also directed seven of the Sense8 episodes, including this one.

However, when it came to filming it, both Clayton and Silvestre revealed it was a complicated puzzle. “It was mainly just Lana [Wachowski] off set telling us, ‘OK, Jamie go in. OK, now Jamie go out,’ ” Clayton, a trans women who plays the trans lesbian characxter Nomi, said during a press conference. “There she was just on the side shouting out directions at all of us — like, where our hands should go and who we should kiss.”

“Lana was whistling what she wanted, and I couldn’t hear her and at the same time, I couldn’t understand her,” Silvestre added. It was also his first day of shooting the show, in which he plays Lito, a closeted Mexican actor. So in nothing but a skin-colored “cock sock,” Silvestre found himself not only meeting his castmates but navigating a scene required him to get physical with everyone on set.

“I remember saying to Brian, ‘I don’t understand her; do you know what we have to do?’ ” he recalled. “I mean, I felt I should kiss [Jamie] in that moment but maybe it was Brian that I had to kiss, I don’t know.” (For the record, Silvestre and Smith do kiss—a moment that’s later addressed toward the end of the first season when the two “meet” for the first time.)

But there’s nothing like a massive orgy to bond a cast. “I felt very good to be surrounded by my family,” Silvestre added.