What do you get when you cross Jamie Dornan, Dakota Johnson and a tampon? An eye-popping scene that didn’t make it into the Fifty Shades of Grey movie, that’s what. With every book-to-movie adaptation there are bound to be a handful of moments that didn’t fit into the script, and the movie based on E.L. James’ BDSM love story decided to forego one of the more graphic scenes of the entire book.
In an interview with Variety, Fifty Shades of Grey director Sam Taylor-Johnson said her team never even discussed filming the tampon moment, and producer Michael De Luca shed a bit more light as to the reasoning.
The book needed to put you in Ana’s shoes to be a successful experience. A lot of it was very literal. The movie didn’t need to do that. It’s a completely different medium.
For those of you who don’t know — and you can stop reading right here if you want to stay away from spoilers — the infamous tampon scene occurs when it’s that time of the month for Anastasia, and Christian wants to have sex regardless. Being the control freak that he is, he slides his hand between her legs and pulls the tampon right out of her. Talk about ignoring the boundaries of personal space.
It’s probably for the best that a scene like this was cut, not only because it reeks of borderline misogynistic undertones. Johnson and De Luca needed to get the film down to an R rating, which is hard to do when there’s so much kinky sex going on in the pages of the source material. At first it was looking like an NC-17 label was inevitable, but thanks to a rewrite on an early draft of the script, it was made far less racy. Though, director Sam Taylor-Johnson believes that even without every single sex scene — including the tampon moment — that fans of the book trilogy will be satisfied with the amount of… action.
In fact, De Luca said that the most intense sex scene of the entire movie comes in at the end, when Anastasia asks Christian to do his worst, as to better gauge what she’s in for down the road. According to the producer, Dornan was "a miracle" and got "carried away in the moment."
If people wanted to see a strict page-to-screen adaptation, they might as well go see a porn version. Remember that comical lawsuit between the official movie and the porno? I write "comical" because the whole issue was that the porn version was made by translating entire scenes into live action, which was technically what Johnson’s movie was trying to do. The lawsuit was settled out of court, and the director wanted to make it clear that only the sex scenes that needed to be there would be.
