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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