Badgley has since stepped in to say that his comments were “blown out of proportion.” During a recent GQ profile, he explained:
“What I was speaking about wasn’t actually the final product. It was sort of like the culture inherent to the production of all movies, but particularly those scenes. It’s like, look, we know that Hollywood has had a history of flagrant exploitation and abuse.”
Badgley himself has been an actor since he was 12 years old and acknowledged that his days as a child star may have shaped his perspective on the subject. His first credit was in “The Fluffer,” a 2001 indie film about the porn industry. “When I read the script, neither my agents, my mom, nor I knew what a fluffer was,” Badgley recalled. “I was the first one to find out because I read the script first. That is a microcosm of the whole thing! Should a 12-year-old be…? Let’s go ahead and just say no.”
All this to say that avoiding intimate scenes is a boundary Badgley admits he would have preferred to set earlier in his career. But before now, he didn’t feel he had the power to do so.
