Woke US bosses tell cast to reshoot sex scenes in Jilly Cooper’s Rivals

She’s the ‘queen of the bonkbuster’, with a worldwide reputation for writing insanely steamy sex scenes.

Yet Dame Jilly Cooper has clashed with cautious American TV executives, who fear an upcoming film adaptation of her raunchy novel Rivals will prove too much for modern viewers.

Bosses at streaming service Disney+ have ordered the reshoots of several intimate scenes from the star-studded series amid concerns they are inappropriate in the post-MeToo era.

However, the contents of Dame Jilly’s 1988 book, set among the social elite in the fictional county of Rutshire, should not have come as a surprise. After acquiring the rights, Disney boasted that the novel was “full of sex” and contained “drama, excess and shocking antics.”

Dame Jilly’s prose isn’t particularly restrained, either. One woman is described as ‘an electric eel in the sack’ and the other as ‘an excited whippet’. Moreover, the story is about a powerful man of almost 40 years who works with a woman who has not yet turned 19, which must have raised alarm signals.

Changed morals: Poldark’s Aidan Turner on the set of the TV version of Rivals, written in 1988

Still, sources close to the project say some executives found certain scenes “a bit much.”

One said: ‘It was a very different world in the 1980s when the book was written, so there were always problems getting it right for today’s viewers.’

However, other insiders suggest another reason for the reshoots – which will likely delay its planned release later this year – claiming that the scenes simply ‘weren’t good enough to air’.

That could be particularly embarrassing, as the eight-part series has a stellar cast including Poldark heartthrob Aidan Turner, ex-Doctor Who David Tennant, Sex Education actress Bella Maclean and Alex Hassell, from BBC fantasy series His Dark Materials.

One source told The Mail on Sunday that two intimacy coordinators had been brought in to ensure the sex scenes were shot with respect for the actors.

But they added: ‘Some of those scenes just weren’t good enough for the Disney bosses in America. The sex scenes lacked a certain something, so many had to be reshot.

‘This will inevitably lead to a delay as to when we can expect it on our screens, which is all quite embarrassing. There are a lot of people trying to make Rivals good enough to air. It is not ideal given the amount of money spent and the major players involved.”

The story centers on dissolute ex-Olympian and Tory MP Rupert Campbell-Black, played by Hassell, who is locked in a bitter battle with Tennant’s selfish and ambitious character Lord Tony Baddingham over the future of a TV production company.

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Hassell’s character also falls for teenage Taggie O’Hara, played by 23-year-old Ms Maclean.

In Dame Jilly’s novel, the marriages are largely marriages of convenience, with women accepting that ‘boys will be boys’. Men are praised for their crazy tendencies. Women’s weight is often referred to. One woman proudly announces that she weighs seven kilos and that anyone over a size six is ​​fat. One young character is called “poor fat Sharon.”

The series, which also stars EastEnders’ Danny Dyer, Nafessa Williams from Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody and IT Crowd’s Katherine Parkinson, has been adapted by former EastEnders writer Dominic Treadwell-Collins.

Disney has been criticized lately for being “too woke,” showing a lesbian kiss in the family film Lightyear, swapping Minnie Mouse’s classic polka dot dress for a more “progressive” pantsuit and putting content warnings on its old films.