With the Internet abuzz over the reveal that director Bernardo Bertolucci didn't warn actress Maria Schneider about every detail of her Last Tango In Paris rape scene because he wanted a realistic shocked reaction, General Hospital alum Natalia Livingston is opening up about her own experience filming a horrific rape scene.
The actress, who played both Emily Quartermaine and Rebecca Shaw on the ABC soap, was involved in a 2006 storyline in which Nikolas Cassadine - portrayed by her real-life boyfriend at the time, Tyler Christopher -- sexually assaulted her character. Fortunately, she reveals that her GH colleagues handled the tough scene with the respect and responsibility she feels were absent on Bertolucci's set.
"It's not okay, what happened on Last Tango In Paris," she tells The Wrap. "You want to be considerate of each other and thoughtful and mindful. It's the director's responsibility to create a safe atmosphere for the actors... What they did was just completely reckless."
Livingston is beyond grateful she had an opposite experience on GH, especially considering her romantic connection to Christopher.
"I was dating Tyler at the time we shot the scene, which added another layer to everything and made it harder to film those scenes," she recalls. "When you're in a relationship, anything physical between the two of you is such a private, personal, in many ways sacred thing. But then you add a storyline like this where you have to act out this horrible, horrible thing with someone you love in real life, and then have to do it in front of the whole world. It's a really hard thing. It's nothing you want to even have in your subconscious."
She continues, "The writers were very thoughtful in the way that they approached me with the rape story. It was a big deal to them, as it was to me. It wasn't anything that they took lightly. One of the writers had her own experience with rape, and it was really, really important to her that the story be told as truthfully and realistically as possible and that were able to help the victims in some way."
For more from Livingston on her own experience with rape scenes as well as further thoughts on the Last Tango In Paris controversy, check out The Wrap's full interview here.
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