Can we all agree that the ideal husband is one who encourages you to hook up with Sebastian Stan, and even helps script scenarios that will allow you to do so? If so, then Melissa Rauch may be the world’s luckiest woman: In this weekend’s new comedy The Bronze, which she co-wrote with her husband Winston, Rauch plays a foul-mouthed former gymnast who gets it on with Stan’s Olympic coach in what is surely the young year’s wildest sex scene. Both characters bring all their athletic prowess to bear on each other, cartwheel-flipping and vaulting into each other’s naughty portions in the most R-rated floor exercise ever conceived. And with each gymnastic thrust, Rauch could count on both Stan and her husband to egg her on
Oh, Winston was so game throughout,” Rauch told Vulture recently in Los Angeles. “Anything for the sake of the movie! He would even be like, ‘I think we should do another take of that.’”
“And that was like the second or third day on set for me,” laughed Stan. “I remember thinking, ‘I’m really gonna get to know these people better.’”
So will the audience: While Stan is most famous for playing Bucky Barnes in the Captain America movies and Rauch has a steady job as Bernadette on The Big Bang Theory, The Bronze offers both actors a new way to cut loose, exemplified by the sort of graphic, over-the-top encounter you’d never see in their more family-friendly franchises. “We wrote it as ‘the most crazy epic gymnastic sex scene ever,’ said Rauch. “It really was a porno script, essentially. But Sebastian was so fantastic and he went for so much of it. He could have just said, ‘Have my body double do it,’ and instead he came to set in his robe and said, ‘Okay, let’s do this.’”
Rauch did, too, but for some of the more graphic moments, she selected as her body double a Cirque du Soleil dancer who had no hang-ups about the scene’s wild stunts (or nudity). “Every time I slammed into her,” Stan said, “I was like, ‘Oh my God, are you okay?’ And she was like, ‘Just go for it.’”
“I remember staring at her like a creepy old dude,” laughed Rauch, “wishing that she could body-double for me in every moment of life. At one point, I was like, ‘Do you want a robe?’ and she said, ‘I’m good, you’re gonna see everything anyway.’ And she was literally sitting there legs open, eating a sandwich.”
That’s the sort of unapologetic female behavior Rauch celebrates in The Bronze, where her character, Hope Ann Greggory, is a former Olympic darling desperately clinging to her 15 minutes of fame. Introduced masturbating to a VHS of her Olympic victory, Hope is a self-absorbed misanthrope whose heart has grown only the teensiest amount by the end of the movie — in other words, the sort of comic asshole that men typically get to play, not women.