Greta Scacchi says Darby and Joan will never get together – and bedroom scene was scrapped

Today, her screen appearances are a little different. In murder mystery Darby and Joan, she stars as widowed English nurse Joan Kirkhope, who teams up with Australian ex-detective Jack Darby (Bryan Brown).

The pair have a will-they, won’t-they relationship in the series — but make no mistake, Scacchi says, there will be no funny business…

Darby and Joan returns this week for season 2 — do you want Jack and Joan to get together?

Bryan and I have always been united in this, but there was tension with the writers and showrunners. In the first series, they kept trying to sneak a French kiss into an episode. Bryan and I both said, “No way!” They even had us sharing the bed platonically at some point, and we weren’t going to do that, either.

Why not?

If you’re in your 60s or 70s and you have a kiss or a spoon, the landscape would change for ever. The writer was saying, “We don’t want to show these people as being old and unable to enjoy a one-night stand,” and I said, “Well, we don’t enjoy a one-night stand!”

One day, Bryan and I saw there was an intimacy coordinator booked and we had to say, “Sorry, you’ve come under false pretences, it’s not happening.” Now the writers are on board with us. If our characters got together, it would be because there’s not going to be another episode.

Do you think you would have benefited from an intimacy coordinator when you first started your career in the '80s?

No, I don’t at all. Actors don’t want to be choreographed into positions unless there’s a real antipathy or a communication problem. Luckily, I didn’t have that.

So you had good relationships with your on-screen co-stars?

Charles Dance on White Mischief was a very disciplined actor and so am I – we could talk and be frank. We were both, at the time, very beautiful and confident about ourselves physically. He was always very considerate and made sure I was comfortable.

Was there a time where you felt uneasy doing intimate scenes?

The most discomfort I’ve had in those situations was with directors and their own… appetites, let’s say. It sometimes gets muddied by voyeurism, and that leads to us being shown stuff that a lot of us don’t want to see. That’s where you need the intimacy coordinator.

How have things changed for actors today?

In my 20s, the female voice was still struggling to emerge, directors were mostly male and simulated lovemaking was obligatory. But in the '80s, it was soft focus and made to look beautiful and slowed down, whereas now I find it really gratuitous – this explicit rutting stuff is very odd to see.

I find it so uninteresting, ugly and very compromising for the actors. It sounds funny coming from me, because I got labelled for nudity and sex scenes, but I don’t believe it was a deserved label.

Where did the label come from?

I had a bed scene with Laurence Olivier [in 1984’s The Ebony Tower] and that’s where it started. The newspapers were salacious and titillating, so even if people weren’t seeing the films that I was in, I got that label. It made me wish I’d used a stage name.

Was that a challenge?

The hardest thing was how my family had to deal with it. My mum was made to feel embarrassed. At school, my children were being taunted about what their mother had done, which is horrendous. It must be 100 times worse for the kids today, because of social media and how sex scenes can be taken out of context. I think it should just stop. In fact, can we just get rid of porn altogether?

As you got older, was it a conscious decision to avoid roles with steamy scenes?

The thing I’m most famous for is turning down Basic Instinct. I didn’t do it, because I had just done Presumed Innocent and White Mischief, and I thought, “I’m going to take a break from this.” I also didn’t like the script, particularly how it portrayed bisexuality. Even that was being portrayed as a male fantasy.

Your children, son Matteo (with Carlo Mantegazza), and daughter Leila George (with Vincent D'Onofrio), are both actors. Did you encourage them?

I didn’t push them, but I certainly furnished their interest in acting as much as I could. Once I was invited to the Cairo Film Festival – Leila was eight, and was learning about the pharaohs and Egypt at school. I thought it was an educational opportunity, so I took them both out of school. We had an amazing trip! I was a very naughty mum…

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Darby and Joan starts on U&Drama at 8pm on Wednesday 2nd July.

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