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Oh how times have changed! Aubrey Plaza claimed that the director told her to masturbate “like it says in the script” while filming a scene for the 2013 movie The To-Do List, which she starred in alongside Rachel Bilson and Bill Hader.

The movie has recently seen a bump in interest due to Plaza’s stardom and her NSFW scene — and because of that, her 2013 interview on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien has resurfaced.

In the interview, Plaza opened up about her experience filming the scene, which featured her “pleasuring herself.”

Nowadays, it’s common to have an intimacy coordinator on set to facilitate conversations between the actors and the director, as well as to ensure a safe filming environment, but it sounds like that wasn’t the case when Plaza starred in the romantic comedy.

The actor recalled being told by writer-director Maggie Carey to “masturbate like it says in the script.”

Plaza explained that when she read the scene in the script, she envisioned it being a cutaway scene; however, when it came to the day of filming, she was proven to be sorely mistaken.

She said, “When I showed up, the camera was mounted on the ceiling and I was in my underwear and a Clinton T-Shirt, and there were a bunch of old men smoking.” Later, she identified them as “the crew guys.”

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Plaza continued, “I thought I was doing one thing and then when I showed up, it was a whole different thing, it was a full body shot. And I asked the director, ‘What should I do?’ And she said, ‘Masturbate, like it says in the script.'”

The actor added, “And then I did that.”

But Carey remembers the process being much-more collaborative than Plaza stated. In a 2013 interview with Vulture, the director said that it was Plaza’s idea to hump a pillow during the masturbation scene.

When asked about the directorial choice, she said, “It was Aubrey Plaza. She’s genius. She was like, ‘Hey, Mags, come in here’ — we had blocked the scene, and I was back at the monitor — and Aubrey was like, ‘Mags, come back in here, I have a question,’ and she was like, ‘Is that too much?’ and I was like, ‘We have to do that. Nothing is too much in this movie.’ Aubrey is game for anything, she’ll try anything; she’s not afraid to be vulnerable or put herself in awkward positions.”

Carey compared the scene to Natalie Portman masturbating in The Black Swan, saying, “I was just laughing how Natalie Portman masturbates in that movie and it’s a lot different than Aubrey Plaza masturbating in The To-Do List. When you do see women masturbating, it’s usually a male fantasy about a woman masturbating, it’s not what actually happens.”

The director added that was important for her to play up the comedy in the scene to match the rest of the movie.

While the two make the ordeal sound all-fun-and-games, Plaza has gotten real about filming the specific scene, telling OregonLive that it was “nerve-wracking.”

“Looking back on it, I feel like the masturbating scene was a little bit the most nerve-racking. Just because in my head I thought, ‘Oh, we’ll probably shoot this in a way where I don’t really have to really do it.’ But then when we did it and I was like, ‘Oh no, we’re going to shoot it where I do it,'” she said.

As the comedy queen has well taught us by now –— through her many funny-yet-troubled roles — sometimes laughter is the best medicine. We’re glad Plaza can laugh this one off!

The To Do List is streaming on Paramount+.