Switch that off and go to your room! What exactly do you think you’re looking at?
These are just some of the phrases you may have heard when growing up and while watching TV with your folks when two of the characters on screen get a little close and intimacy ensues.
You would promptly be told to close your eyes, or the channel would be changed until the romance passed and then one of your rents would flick back over.
This is the society we live in, haigabe, but as South Africans we are all kinds of vanilla.
It was only a matter of time until showrunners really latched on to this and in these times of social media hype and attention, it was inevitable that things on local television screens would get a little more racy and that is what the Showmax original, Adulting is serving up by the bucket load.
The story of four varsity friends who are now trying to make their way in this wild little world of ours is two seasons deep with this sophomore outing getting tongues wagging because of the sex scenes it houses.
Preparing for on screen intimacy and the blowback from a risqué performance
There is a local legend at the eye of this sexy storm, and she has been a mainstay for years now, stretching as far back as the heyday of kwaito to being a staple on local TV shows.
“There was a lot of back and forth with the project. It was not an easy decision to agree to take this role,” Thembi Seete says.
The story really drove the 45-year-old actor and musician towards the project. A simple enough premise and yet the plot is still gripping enough to have the streets abuzz with conversation.
The raunchy aspects of it are something Thembi feels are shunned by South Africans and that is to our detriment.
Read more | Mixed reactions as Thembi Seete debuts on Adulting
“We don't put these issues on the table and the role of a storyteller, the role of an actor or an actress is to tell stories that are fun, or are at times uncomfortable, sad, and to tell stories that are sometimes shocking.”
She knew the role of Portia would be a shocking one and it took the actor a fortnight of grappling with the idea of performing this role. She went from doing the role one day to rethinking her stance the next until she decided to alter her mind state about it.
“Prepare yourself. You're an actor. You're a professional. You have portrayed different characters. Somebody has to do it. Be the brave one. Be the one that is going to have guts and jump on it and tell the story,” went the internal conversation Thembi had with herself.
“And I did it. It was a mental thing.” she adds with a bubbly chuckle.
She reasoned with herself and kept the focus on this being a role that she was taking on and portraying and that Portia isn’t anything like Thembi.
Naturally for the actor the most challenging part of this role was, “after. What came after was way more demanding than actually performing the role. Because when you are busy portraying the person, when you're on set and you have all the support and you have the coach, the intimacy coaches, you have your director, you have people that are making sure that you are comfortable and all of that and also your mind has decided that you're in this situation and you're going to do the best as you can.
“It's when everything is done, cut, it's a wrap, go home, and you think back, it's like, oh my God, what have I just done,” she says with a slight tinge of exasperation filling her speech.
“You have to be mentally strong to be able to portray certain characters. If you're not mentally strong while you're busy acting, you'll break down because you're allowing yourself to be part of something that you're not supposed to allow yourself to be part of.”
Thembi says that the cast and crew weren’t bracing for the impact her role would have or any of the conversations it has started with people either praising her or wondering why she would do a role of this nature.
“No, not even. That was the role and that is the duty of a professional actor," she states sternly.
She recalls a friend of hers seeing the show and they were genuinely bewildered as to whether that was their friend on screen, and she had to remind this person that she was acting and being someone far removed from who she is.
“That's not my, I don't know how to describe it, but that's not my energy. That’s not me. I'm just portraying this character. But there were never discussion with the production and crew like, are you ready for what's going to come next? I'm also surprised. I honestly thought the focus was only going to be on the story."
Thembi is upbeat throughout and speaks in a melodious way, something that dissipated when she was asked about the conversations and responses her role invoked.
"Look, it's just something that I've lived to see for a long time. I’ve done a lot of projects and even if a project is great and there's really nothing to criticise or there's nothing to talk about, I know that there will always be opinions. It's good to have opinions. What’s the point of doing something and people are quiet?
"What's the point of putting your work out there, putting yourself out there and nobody sees anything? Whether positive or negative it's something that I've learned. It’s something that I've lived my life with. Whether I do music, acting or presenting, there will always be someone saying something. That's the price you pay for being in the industry or any industry for that matter.”
Lifting the veil on sex scenes
The most demanding part of bringing this role to life were the sex scenes.
“Yeah, they were demanding. But I was really blessed to work with professionals and the support that we got from people that are trained to do all these kinds of scenes. They really supported us as actors. Even my co-actor as well, Luthando Bu Mthembu who plays Vuyani was also not 100% comfortable at first. But because of his experience from season one, he also shared his, one or two cents and he said do it like this, do it like that. Don't worry about that. Are you comfortable?”
Read more | Solid start to season two of Showmax's Adulting
Consent is paramount when doing these scenes and everything is discussed at length before, during and after filming.
“There was really no touching, no real contact. There was no contact between, how can I put it, like the private parts or whatever that people are concerned about. People say, ‘oh, my God, it looks so convincing. It looks so real,’ but there's never real contact. It's just that with acting and direction and choreography, things do seem like they are happening for real.”
How does it all work then, a sex scene, how are these constructed traditionally?
“Just before shooting the scene, obviously we come together as a crew, as a team. We talk about it and as artists as well, we talk about what's making us uncomfortable in terms of our body parts and our private parts as well. Those are fully covered by clothes; we wear specially designed underwear that matches your skin tone. So, it's as if you're not wearing anything, but we are wearing something.”
A discussion around what the actors are comfortable showing and how they would best like for the scene to be shot is had at length as well. Thembi even reveals that as an actor you can decide how many people are present during that shoot.
As an actor you have the right to have the set closed that day. “I only want a camera guy and I only want a sound guy. If there is a sound guy with a boom, the sound guy must see my face, not my back."
She was taken aback by some of the engagements this role amassed but she feels it is all part of South Africans having an antiquated outlook on sex.
“I can’t wait for us to get to a point where we are open minded, especially with sexuality. Sometimes we look at people and we forget that they are human beings, they are sexual beings. I think the increasingly we need to open ourselves up and be open-minded and to be careful because obviously we're raising kids, we need to be responsible, but I feel like we are backwards when it comes to sex. The ways we were raised, I mean, you bring up a sexual thing or you see people on TV and you grow up feeling like sex is not for you, ‘it’s a part of the world that I am not supposed to know about’.”
She says children are especially curious as to how they came to be or how it was they emerged from their mother’s tummy.
“We have to give honest answers, be as open as we can and not lie to our kids because you grow with that mentality. That's why we experience a high rate of teenage pregnancy, a high rate of sexual assault because we don't openly talk about these things. Young people we need to train ourselves to treat it as something that needs to be spoken about freely."
