Lizzy Caplan once visited a live sex show in Amsterdam

Actress Lizzy Caplan was well prepared to watch couples get intimate for her new U.S. TV drama Masters Of Sex thanks to the experience of watching a live sex show in Europe. The Mean Girls star reveals she visited Amsterdam’s famous red light district – known for its sex shops, peep shows and marijuana coffee shops – while she was backpacking through the Netherlands when she was 19, and decided to take in a a real-life sex show.
She explains, “Somebody handed me a flyer for a live sex show and of course I was willing to check that out… So I got to the show, I was surprised it was in a… proper theatre with a stage and an audience and couples are on the bed, two at a time, and they have sex with each other and you sit in the audience and you watch this happen.
“Now every 10 minutes a new couple comes on and… I look around and everyone is like, ‘What is happening right now, they’re having sex in front of me, this is so weird,’ and the people having sex on the bed on the stage are chit-chatting, like bored, but they’re fully having sex with each other – and they’re having idle conversation.”
In Masters of Sex, Caplan plays Virginia Johnson, a real-life pioneer in human sexuality research, and she reveals the role required her to watch actors simulate sex in front of her.
It was only after shooting the show that she understood how people could be so comfortable in sexual situations.
She continues, “I didn’t think that (having idle conversation during sex) made any sense at the time and now, cut to me having idle conversation (on the show), while people do that (simulate sex).”