Entertainment

Richard Madden Had The Most LOL Warning For His Mum Ahead Of THAT 'Rocketman' Scene

by Emma Madden
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Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

When you become a big-time actor like Richard Madden, there's no doubt that your parents will follow your every move with awe and pride, throwing viewing parties with everyone they know no matter what the role is. But there can be a downside to that. Particularly when they invite all the neighbours and everyone in the family over to a screening that includes you getting your kit off. That might be why Richard Madden warned his mum about nudity in Rocketman. To be fair, I think I'd probably have to do the same.

Appearing on Good Morning America on Thursday, May 23, Madden explained that he warned his mum ahead of her viewing that there'd be a sex scene with her son and Taron Egerton, the actor playing the lead role in the Elton John biopic. "She got a warning this time," Madden said. "She was told it was coming.... not making that mistake again."

The actor was referring back to his occasionally saucy appearance on BBC's giant smash hit Bodyguard, as he told Ellen Degeneres back on Dec. 13, 2018. Madden told Degeneres that he'd failed to give his mum the adequate warning before he got into bed with Julia Montague.

"I've made a few mistakes in my time, which is neglecting to tell my mother that there's going to be a sex scene in a show and then I get a kind of hysterical phone call of, 'You must tell me and your father! I was watching it at the time and my cup of tea, I nearly spilled it.' And then she covers her eyes," he told a laughing Ellen.

But in the case of Rocketman, Madden considers the nudity particularly necessary, even if it'll make his parents hide behind their hands. As he told Entertainment Weekly in an interview that was published on Thurs, May 23, it would've been a disservice to remove the nudity and love scenes from the film. After playing Elton John's lover John Reid in the biopic, the actor told the mag: “It’s an intimate thing between these two characters and a significant moment in Elton’s life,” he said, “And Elton’s life was very R-rated, wasn’t it?”

Lately, the actor's been taking a hard pass on anything involving "gratuitous nudity," as he told Vogue on May 4:

"I read scripts where, within the first 15 pages, it says, ‘He gets into the shower…’ And I think, I know exactly what this is, it’s just a scene to get me to take my clothes off. And then I’m like, ‘Right, if you can f**king explain to me why it’s important that I have my shirt off then I will absolutely do it. But if you can’t’ — which they often can’t — ‘then I won’t.’"

He says that, what with all the preparation he has to undergo before a nude scene — "kind of barely eating, working-out-twice-a-day, no-carbing thing for these scenes" — that he and his hunky actor cohort are "projecting a very unrealistic body image." It's something that female stars have been railing against for a long time, and it looks like the men are now taking note too.

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