House of Guinness breakout star Anthony Boyle — who made waves on social media with a fully naked scene on the Netflix show and several queer hookups along the way — revealed that he didn’t wear a prosthetic during that full frontal scene. “It’s my own body,” the actor noted.
Episode 3 of the series showed Arthur Guinness (Boyle’s character) smoking while taking a bath, then getting up from the bathtub completely naked, giving fans a full view of the actor’s front and back. When asked by Men’s Health if he used a prosthetic for the scene, Boyle replied: “It’s not a prosthetic. It’s my own body.”
The only other character in the scene is an older male servant who gives Arthur a towel to dry off. Despite that power dynamic already being clear, Arthur still seemed “disdainful” of the servant, which prompted Boyle to come up with a more impactful version of the scene that involved him being completely naked.
“I sort of wrote that aspect into the scene,” the actor told the publication. “It was the night before we were filming, and [Arthur] was in the script originally meant to be getting his cufflinks on by the mirror. That felt a bit boring, so I called the director and said, ‘I think he should be smoking and drinking whiskey in the bath, and he should be completely naked and just get up, to show that he owns the whole fucking world.’”
Anthony Boyle as Arthur Guinness on House of Guinness.
Boyle added, “He wouldn’t even have to say anything to say, ‘I’m above these servants. This is my world. I am dominant, and I control everything.’ That’s what I wanted to show.”
Well, mission accomplished!
Elsewhere in the interview, Boyle was asked about House of Guinness leaning into the rumors that Arthur was actually queer. Even though authors like Joe Joyce had already written books like 2009’s The Guinnesses: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Most Successful Family — and had concluded that Arthur Guinness was likely a gay man after doing extensive research — the character had never been portrayed as such in a high-profile project as big as this Netflix series.
“I didn’t know much about the Guinness family and everything was new to me. I was learning,” the actor explained. “One thing Steven [Knight], who wrote the show, and I really wanted to get right is that we didn’t ever feel like Arthur should be ashamed of his sexuality. He should be proud of it — the world around him got it wrong, but he knew who he was and felt pride in that.”
Boyle concluded, “People have been gay from the dawn of time, and if we don’t follow the clues and write these people into history, then we’re writing them out of history. With a role like Arthur, the clues about everything are there, so if we were just to pretend that he wasn’t gay, we would be doing a disservice to everyone — and to history.”
House of Guinness is streaming on Netflix.
