Naomi Watts' nerves for Mulholland Drive masturbation scene gave her "explosive something or other"

Watts gifted us with this bit of honesty in conversation with Jonathan Bailey for Variety’s “Actors On Actors” series. Bailey had a masturbation scene in Fellow Travelers, and it made him think of Watts’ masturbation scene in the David Lynch classic. “Oh, Mulholland Drive. Yes. I was traumatized,” Watts admitted of the scene. She laughed: “I remember having to go to the bathroom multiple times because I think I might have been having explosive something or other.”

Look, Watts may have too much class to say the word diarrhea, but we all know what she’s talking about! And having to do such an intense and intimate scene would cause anybody’s stomach to act up. “I was so in butterflies. I was freaked out, and David knew that, but he didn’t want to not get the scene. And I kept sort of attempting it and going, ‘I can’t do this, David. I can’t do it,’” she recalled. “He was always off at the other side of the room in a black tent or something, and actually he made it very private for me.”

Watts said the way she was sectioned off on the set helped her “feel a little bit safer,” but she “kept crying” trying to act out what was required of her in the moment. That made it more difficult, because Lynch “didn’t want an emotive scene; he wanted someone who was angry and trying to reconnect with an erotic moment that she’d shared with Laura Harring’s character,” she explained. “It was making me emotional and vulnerable.” Girl, we’ve all been there. Well, not there-there, but you know, there, on the toilet somewhere, nervously pooing.