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Why Thandie Newton Owns Her Full Bush on 'Westworld'

Thandie Newton isn’t afraid of nude scenes on her show, HBO’s hit Westworld. During the first season, she plays Maeve, a humanoid robot who was programmed to be a brothel owner and sex worker in the very weird Old West town/amusement park. After becoming sentient, aware of her status as a robot and that, in her previous “life,” she’d had a “daughter,” she begins to rebel while she’s being “reprogrammed” at night. Coincidentally, this happens to be when she’s nude—her “natural state”—versus the brothel-madam costume designed to objectify her for the park’s visitors.

Westworld is now on season two, and because this is HBO and nudity is a given, Newton still does nude scenes in the show. But she hilariously opened up on the BBC’s The Graham Norton Show on Friday about one aspect of her costume: namely, her merkin—or lack thereof.

In case you don’t know what this delightful word means, it is a pubic wig. Should a lady choose to go bare down there but then need to have a little bush going on for, say, their character’s nude scene on a hit HBO show, a merkin comes in handy.

Handy, that is, unless you’re Newton, the proud owner of a bush all her own. “I didn’t need the merkin because I don’t alter anything—full ‘70s bush,” she announced on the show.

She also rightly pointed out that hey, the show is set in the Old West. No one was getting waxed back in those wild days, and when characters are seen nude, it’s with full-on pubic hair—or, yep, in some cases, a merkin. “The prairie, the wide-open prairie!” Newton said. “They weren’t waxing and stripping and plucking!”

Another reason? Apparently it takes 45 minutes to apply a merkin, and Newton just wants to head home to chill with her 2-year-old. Hear, hear.

Watch the entire exchange here:

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The First ‘Westworld’ Season 2 Trailer Is Honestly Too Much to Take in at Once

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Evan Rachel Wood Says She'll Receive Equal Pay for 'Westworld' Season 3

Despite being one of the main characters and arguably the most recognizable face of Westworld, Evan Rachel Wood said she was not paid the same as her male colleagues for the first two seasons. That’s coming to an end, though: The actress just confirmed that she’ll receive equal pay in the third season of the hit HBO show. (Season two is set to premiere on April 22.)

“I think I’m just now to the point where I’m getting paid the same as my male co-stars,” Wood said in a recent interview with TheWrap. Specifically, her salary will now be the same as costars Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris, who play Dr. Ford and The Man in Black, respectively. “I was just told that, you know, ‘Hey you’re, you’re getting equal pay.’ And I was like,” she said, miming a gasp. “And I almost got emotional. I was like, ‘I have never been paid the same as my male counterparts … Never, never.’”

The change was not for lack of effort on the part of the star. Wood has been a vocal supporter of the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements, but felt her status did not compare to that of the two legendary actors. “I’m always fighting for [equal pay],” Wood added. “And I have turned down projects [because of it]. Westworld, it’s like, I get it a little more,” she said laughing. “It’s like, ‘Well, you’re Anthony Hopkins or Ed Harris.’ But I think now we’re all doing equal amounts of work and really hard work.”

Earlier this month, HBO pledged to address the gender pay disparity and close the gap. “We’ve proactively gone through all of our shows—in fact, we just finished our process where we went through and made sure that there were no inappropriate disparities in pay; and where there were, if we found any, we corrected it going forward,” HBO executive Casey Bloys said in a recent interview.

“There is a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes. There is a lot of trying to make things equal and trying to make things fair. I don’t know, there is a lot of stuff,” Wood added, potentially referencing the recent changes at the company. “But this is the first time that somebody made a point of being like, ‘Hey you’re getting this. And you deserve it.’ And that was nice.”

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