Glen Powell and Richard Linklater Talk ‘Hit Man’ Sex Scenes

The last couple years have seen a startling phenomenon for moviegoers: a rise in online backlash to sex scenes.

At the IndieWire Studio at Sundance, presented by Dropbox, “Hit Man” actor Glen Powell and director Richard Linklater addressed the issue head-on.

“Yeah, the last couple years there’s been a lot of thought [on] ‘Oh, sexy movies? Is it gone? People are uncomfortable,’” Linklater told Executive Editor, Film, Kate Erbland. “And I’m like, ‘My God, that’s the only reason I went to movies as a young person — I was hoping to see a sex scene.’”

“Hit Man” uses sex scenes to chart the evolution of Powell’s Gary, an everyday guy who occasionally uses his IT skills to help out the local police force, who is then pulled into a sting operation in which he poses as a hit man to catch people looking to solicit the services of one. His undercover persona is “Ron,” and the two identities are quite different.

Gary has little passion in his day-to-day. “That part is completely absent from his life,” Powell said. “He’s living completely in his head. He’s completely binary in terms of logic. And a lot of the big exploration of what we were trying to play with here is a guy who slowly but surely turns off the logic part of his brain and gives into humanity and passion and checks that logic at the door — which will eventually bite him in the ass!”

“His passion [as Ron] becomes dangerous,” Linklater added….