Christina Ricci Says She Was Threatened With Lawsuit Over Declining to Do a Sex Scene in a “Certain Way”

Christina Ricci says that things have come a long way for actresses in Hollywood, especially when it comes to setting boundaries around intimacy scenes.

The Wednesday actress recently appeared on The View to promote the second season of Showtime’s hit series Yellowjackets. While there, she reflected how the show’s older actresses frequently talk about the ways the younger actresses — who portray the teen versions of the show’s leading female ensemble — have more of a voice and the power to advocate for themselves on sets.

“It’s amazing to see that they don’t necessarily have to go through things that we had to go through,” Ricci said. “They’re able to say, ‘I don’t want to do this sex scene. I’m not going to be naked.’ They can set boundaries for themselves that we were never allowed to do.”

That’s when Ricci alleged that on an unnamed project, she was threatened with legal action for pushing back on how a sex scene was going to be filmed. “Someone threatened to sue me once because I didn’t want to do this sex scene in a certain way,” she told the View co-hosts. “So it’s really changed and it’s great to see.”

Co-host Joy Behar argued that there are “more sex scenes than ever” on the screen — and pointed specifically to streaming as a source of this — before adding that more actresses might “want to” do intimacy scenes. Ricci didn’t quite agree, but noted that even so, women have more agency thanks to changes like the advent of intimacy coordinators.

Speaking to her own time in Hollywood as a young actress, Ricci previously told The Hollywood Reporter as part of an August 2022 cover story that she had regrets about her time acting in the ’90s and wishes she would “just like to go back to that age and do it over again and not make so many fucking mistakes.”

“Now that it’s more of their choice instead of something you’re forced to do, then you can get into the artistry of it or know how important it is for the story,” she said. “I think that when you take away somebody’s control over something like that, it just makes you never want to do it.”

“I’d like to go back to 1996 and be like, ‘All right … we had a practice run. It went OK, but it wasn’t really as great as we wanted it to be,'” she continued. “We’re going to do this again.'”