The story behind the worst sex scene ever filmed is, itself, like something out of the movies.
It was 1972, in an apartment on Rue de l’Alboni, where Bernardo Bertolucci was making a film called Last Tango in Paris. Marlon Brando was playing Paul, a middle-aged man grieving his wife’s suicide; Maria Schneider was playing Jeanne, Paul’s much younger lover. The couple’s intense and brutal relationship is already beginning to unravel, and this scene represented the beginning of the end: a brutal act of sexual violence in which Paul anally rapes Jeanne using a stick of butter as a lubricant.
But Schneider, who was just 19 at the time, didn’t know what was coming. Not just because the butter wasn’t in the script, but because the 31-year-old Bertolucci and 48-year-old Brando conspired to keep her from knowing this detail.