Naomi Watts has said a sex scene with her now-husband Billy Crudup was so steamy that it sparked their relationship.
The Oscar-nominated actor, 54, spoke about the experience, revealing that it made her “blush” and “break character”.
Watts opened up about her sex life and libido as part of her frank new book Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known about Menopause.
In an extract of her book published in The Times, the Mulholland Drive star recounted meeting Crudrup on the set of the 2017 Netflix series Gypsy, in which Watts played a “horny, sociopathic therapist”. Crudup played the husband of her character.
“Billy and I chatted on set during lighting changes and I’d have said we were friendly,” Watts wrote.
“But for a very long time, that was as far as it went. I was so closed off to love that in the months and months of shooting, even after we’d simulated sex on screen many times, dry-humping each other to the point of exhaustion, I hadn’t given romance with him a thought.”
At the time, Watts had recently separated from her ex-husband, the American actor Liev Schrieber, whom she was with for 11 years. They share two children together.
Watts said that she changed her mind about Crudup after filming a sex scene so steamy it made her “blush” and “break character”.
“Then one day during a sex scene, he spontaneously flung a pillow across the room while ravishing me with such passion that I blushed and broke character,” she wrote.
““Oh! Why, hello, sailor,” I thought to myself, and as me, not as the woman I was playing. Then: “Wait, that felt like… something.”
Elsewhere in the book, she recalled a “mortifying” moment that occurred when she and Crudup had sex together for the first time.
The Impossible star said that she “excused” herself before “things got hot and frisky” in order to “scratch off” her hormone patch out of fear that he would learn that she was in menopause.
“I went into the bathroom before getting naked and furiously attempted to scratch a hormone patch off my body,” she said, explaining that she had begun wearing the patch a couple of years earlier for hormone therapy.
Watts recalled the difficulty of removing the patch, and coming out of the bathroom “mortified” after taking so long.
When Crudup asked her what was wrong, she responded: “Menopause! I didn’t want to tell you. I wear these hormone patches, and I didn’t want you to see it because then you would know I’m in early menopause, which means I am old, and you wouldn’t want me and, oh my God, should I just leave?”
Watts went on to recall Crudup’s sweet response, stating that he “seemed very relieved that the issue wasn’t a lack of desire” and that he told her “it was great I was taking care of myself and he asked how he could help”.
“Double phew,” wrote Watts, revealing that he later told her: “Hey, if it makes you feel better, I’ve got grey hairs on my balls” – which Watts called “the most romantic words I’ve ever heard”.
Watts and Crudup began dating in 2017 and got married in June 2023.
Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known about Menopause by Naomi Watts is published on 23 January.
