Elle Fanning has spoken candidly about how nudity is handled in her new Apple TV+ series Margo’s Got Money Troubles, and why she is particularly proud of the way it was approached.
The Oscar nominee plays Margo, an undergraduate student who falls pregnant by her English professor and turns to OnlyFans to support herself and her baby.
In adapting Rufi Thorpe’s novel with showrunner David E. Kelley, Fanning said she had lengthy conversations about how to depict nudity in a way that felt purposeful rather than gratuitous.
“I’m really proud of how the nudity is depicted on [Margo’s Got Money Troubles], because it’s not in an overly sexualized way at all,” she told PEOPLE.
“A lot of it is actually just having to do with the necessities of motherhood, the need to feed your child and breastfeed. And then that’s kind of juxtaposed, later, when Margo’s doing her OnlyFans. But I think it’s a nice commentary of how her relationship to her body changes.”
She noted that nudity is “never the focal point of the scene,” which she found creatively interesting rather than uncomfortable.
The physical preparation for some scenes was more involved than expected.
For the breastfeeding sequences, Fanning wore prosthetics complete with a milk-squirting mechanism.
“I would be in the trailer and they’d put them on, and then I would feel like, ‘OK, I’m just going to walk out.’ And I’m like, ‘Wait a second, I can’t walk out. This isn’t a shirt.'”
Fanning stars alongside Nicole Kidman, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman, Michael Angarano, Thaddea Graham and Greg Kinnear.
New episodes of Margo’s Got Money Troubles stream Wednesdays on Apple TV+.
