Chris Pine questions reactions to his nude scene in Outlaw King

London: Chris Pine is not amused by the kind of reactions his full-frontal nude scene in his latest "Outlaw King" has evoked and the actor called out the hypocrisy in films where showing intimacy is forbidden while gore is accepted.

The actor plays Scottish warrior Robert the Bruce in the Netflix film and the scene in question is when he emerges from a lake after a bath, having seized the Scottish crown during the oppressive occupation of medieval Scotland by English King Edward I.

The scene has led to lots of innuendo, while the nudity of Florence Pugh, who plays Robert's wife Elizabeth, has gone largely unremarked-upon.

"People are giggling about my penis as if we're schoolchildren. There are movies with people sawing their heads off and you can show that to a 13-year-old in my country and it's not a problem.

"You show two people having sex and your mother's got to hide you from it. And if you distil that down, there's something about showing intimacy which is verboten, but showing violence which is thumbs up," Pine told The Mirror.

The actor says he was unable to wrap his head around how his character being portrayed in the nude was raising eyebrows and why people assumed it was okay for the female lead Pugh to show her body.

"In exploring this kind of man who is to be called king and treated like a king, I thought it was important to see the king and the animal, the man and the animal ? that his feet are in the mud. That he is both violent and primitive and bestial, but also something else. 

"So I thought to see the human de-clothed and as his animal self is really important. But Florence shows her entire body in this film and no one is talking about that. People want to talk about my penis as if we're a bunch of teenagers playing spin the bottle," he said.

Pine, 38, further questioned why no one was talking about the violence in the film.

"Is Florence expected to do that because she is a woman and I'm not expected to do that because I'm a man? Certainly, there's a lot of violence in this film and people get debowelled and stuff like that, and no one wants to talk about that.

"And I think it's certainly a marker of our puritanical culture where, if people make love or show what God gave us, it's somehow NC-17 (adult-rated) and you can debowel, behead... You can do all sorts of crazy sh*t like that and people are like, 'Yeah that seems right'. Let's put a big mirror up to us and say, 'Why? What's going on, guys?'" he said.