‘The Perfect Couple’: Nicole Kidman and Liev Scheiber’s Steamy Window Sex Scene is All About “Keeping Secrets”

The Perfect Couple is an unabashedly fun show. The Netflix murder mystery embraces camp, celebrates excess, and gleefully indulges all of our darker appetites. Case in point: The Perfect Couple‘s unique approach to sex.

**Spoilers for The Perfect Couple Episodes 1-4, now streaming on Netflix, ahead**

In The Perfect Couple Episode 4 “Someone Could Get Hurt,” noted “DILF” Tag Winbury (Liev Schreiber) attempts to reconcile with his beautiful novelist wife Greer (Nicole Kidman) after doing several naughty things. Greer has not only discovered that Tag gifted his pregnant mistress Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy) an $18,000 bracelet, but in the aftermath of Merritt’s murder on their property, Tag has continued to bait her with his irresponsible behavior.

At this point in the story, it’s unclear if Tag killed Merritt to clean up the mess of her unplanned pregnancy or if Greer arranged for the influencer’s death out of vengeance. It’s also uncertain if the Winbury’s fetishized “perfect marriage” can survive this latest storm. The only thing that’s obvious is that Tag is still horny for Greer and Greer can’t resist his charms. A tense private conversation between the spouses soon turns erotic as Tag sidles up behind his frustrated wife and proceeds to have sex with her against an open window.

Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber’s window sex scene in The Perfect Couple is incredibly sexy thanks to the actors’ palpable chemistry, but it never gets vulgar. The Perfect Couple‘s director and executive producer Susanne Bier focuses the camera mostly on the actors’ faces, from the other side of the window pane, to not only show the audience the couple’s passion, but to also implicate us as voyeurs peeking into the Winburys’ most private, intimate moments.

Throughout The Perfect Couple, we know that characters are hooking up on the down low or desperately coveting each other, but there’s little to no actual nudity. Susanne Bier explained to Decider that the reason she wanted to make Greer and Tag’s window scene so sensual, yet so seemingly tame, was to thread an important thematic needle.

“Look, the show is very sexy and there is a lot of sex in the show, but I did not feel that this show was a show where I actually wanted to do, like, explicit sex scenes,” Susanne Bier told Decider during a recent interview. “I didn’t feel that it was the right show.”

“I felt this show is so much about secrets that if you kind of do explicit sex scenes, then you kind of dismantle the whole notion of keeping the secrets.”

There’s no way any grown adult can watch Kidman and Schreiber’s minute-long hookup against the window and not know what’s going on just out of frame. Ironically, it’s what’s left to the imagination — the secrets that are still kept — that fuels the eroticism of the sequence and the dramatic tension of the whole show.

Bier added that by focusing on the actors’ faces, she also was able to express more than just sex in the scene.

“You kind of understand from [Greer’s] face that it’s very passionate, but it’s not uncomplicated passion,” Bier said. “Which was kind of the point of the scene.” 

Do Tag and Greer love each other? Yes, it seems, and no. They can just as easily be caught up in the haze of a mid-day romp as they can be found quietly scheming against each other.

The fact that so much is expressed through a seemingly simple voyeuristic camera angle is a testament to the Oscar, Emmy, Golden Globe, and European Film Award-winning Bier.