Greg Poehler On ‘You Me Her’ Nude Scenes: Getting Them Cut Is ‘Much Worse Than Actually Shooting Them’

The show is about a married couple. I play the man in that married couple relationship. They’re married for a little bit and are in a bit of a rut. My character, Jack, hires an escort to save the marriage – very convoluted thinking. He immediately confesses to his wife and it turns out she has a somewhat sordid lesbian past, and meets up with the escort herself. Then the three of them embark on a three way relationship.

The romantic scenes with the three of us were just — it was interesting for me in terms of spatially — you don’t really think of the dynamics of a three-person relationship. There’s always gonna be that one person that is left out and when we were shooting those sex scenes, it was just interesting to see that it was tough to find a place. Like, where I’m supposed to be? And you realize that there’s a very real, practical problem with this three-person relationship. I saw that you will feel left out at times, you will feel some shame, that’s perfectly normal. Just let it play out; you’ll get your turn. That’s my advice based on my threesome experience.

It was interesting. I kind of tapped into a very emotional part of me through Nisha Ganatra, who's our wonderful director. He directed all 10 episodes, really had us go through some stuff during rehearsals to try to really connect with our emotions in general, and not just with the characters. I cried quite a bit. I’ll say a lot of actors can cry on cue, but I can cry off cue, even when it’s not required. There were some scenes where I could literally hear people, the producers in the background saying, ‘Why is he crying? He’s not supposed to be crying.’ So that was kind of cool actually. I feel like that would be my advice to actors, if you ever just wanna throw some emotion into a scene, randomly cry when it’s not required.

I do not get embarrassed, luckily. If I did, I couldn’t have done this role. Something about standing around fairly naked – if not totally naked – in front of a group of fifty, that kind of requires that you not be so modest. For me, it’s not so much the shooting of the sex scenes that’s embarrassing, it’s more when you get the first cut and you realize they’ve cut out all of your nude scenes. That’s more embarrassing. That’s much worse than actually shooting them. When people see the scenes and say, ‘You know what? Nobody needs to see that, we can’t even CGI that, it’s a lost cause.’ There’s just enough, I think, of those type of scenes in the show.

I was a lawyer for 12 years in both New York and Sweden. I moved to Sweden with my wife, who’s Swedish, and about four years ago I sat up in my attic and wrote the script to Welcome To Sweden, which eventually got bought by NBC and sent around the world. When I was writing that script, there was definitely a voice in my head that was telling me this is ridiculous – a very loud, doubting voice that was telling me that this was pathetic and that there’s millions of people that think they can act, think they can write and so please stop. There was another more positive voice that was also in my head saying, you can do it man, just, someone has to give you a shot. So, luckily, there have been people who have given me a shot. I’m eternally grateful for that. I think the moral of the story is to tell that doubting voice in your head to shut the hell up.