To get into her role as Dr Klemperer in Suspiria, Tilda Swinton wore a set of fake male genitalia. From Nymphomaniac to Boogie Nights, here’s cinema’s story of fake body parts

To prepare for her role as Dr Klemperer in the upcoming remake of Suspiria, Tilda Swinton ventured into the world of prosthetic male genitalia. While her commitment to the part might sound excessive, we’re seeing this kind of thing happen more in movies. You could draw an inappropriately shaped line from Mark Wahlberg’s lovingly crafted accessory in Boogie Nights (scaled down from Dirk Diggler’s real-life inspiration, John “13 ½ inches” Holmes) to the abominably proportioned monster on display in The Greasy Strangler, stopping in between at movies such as The Overnight, in which Jason Schwartzman and Adam Scott compare sizes.

It is in the area of sex that fake genitals are most often called for. We can think we’re seeing the real thing when we aren’t. In Blue Is the Warmest Colour, for example, its stars used fake vulvas for their overextended lesbian sex scenes. And Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac used fake sex organs (as well as “porn doubles”) rather than making stars Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stacy Martin perform actual sex acts.

This is something of a reversal from the late 1990s, when real on-screen sex was seen as a taboo-busting advance. Von Trier provided the first on-screen penetration in a mainstream UK movie with 1998’s The Idiots (the director put the cast at ease by directing naked). In the early 2000s, Kerry Fox was giving Mark Rylance fellatio for real in Intimacy, Chloë Sevigny was doing the same with Vincent Gallo in The Brown Bunny, and Michael Winterbottom was serving up similar scenes in 9 Songs. Relaxation of UK censorship laws meant more was permitted.

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After this period, however, lines started to become uncomfortably blurred. Actors are now mindful that their sex or nude scenes could find a permanent home at the pornier margins of the internet. Such scenes can overshadow other aspects of a movie: new Robert the Bruce pic Outlaw King, for example, has so far prompted less discussion of Scottish history than it has of Chris Pine’s “dazzling” penis. Or you could become the subject of an excruciating skit such as Seth MacFarlane’s 2013 Oscar ceremony song, We Saw Your Boobs. Yes, that really happened.

That’s not to say we need a new age of Mary Whitehouse-style censorship and prudishness, but there are alternatives. HBO show The Deuce recently took the step of hiring an “intimacy coordinator” to oversee its (prosthetics-assisted) sex and nudity scenes more sensitively. Now HBO has pledged to employ one on every production. Maybe everyone else should too. We can applaud Swinton for her extreme commitment to the role in Suspiria, but it turns out there are limits to how method you need to get. And how much of our actors we really need to see.

Suspiria is in UK cinemas from 16 November