Alexander Skarsgård is clearing up any questions people might have about one of the more alarming nude scenes in his new movie Pillion.

The Big Little Lies star plays the leader of a biker gang in the new BDSM romance, which also stars Harry Potter actor Harry Melling as the submissive to Alexander’s character.

When Pillion premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring, it received a wave of praise from critics, with much being made in the media about its no-holds-barred sexual content.

One such instance comes relatively early on in the film, when Alexander’s character is seen fully nude and sporting an intimate piercing.

During a joint interview between its two stars and director Harry Lighton with The Independent, it was confirmed that the Swedish star made use of a prosthetic for this sequence.

“There was a lot of thought put into what the penis looked like, actually,” the filmmaker recalled. “The piercing says everything about Ray. It says that he’s a well-experienced member of this community. It says that he has an edge. Those details were important to me.

“And it was a way of telling the audience something about this character who doesn’t tell you very much about himself [verbally].”

In the scene in question, Alexander’s character is seen nude from the side, but in an earlier edit of the movie, this sequence was even more explicit.

“There was one close up of a dick, a hard dick … like down the barrel of the lens,” Harry Lighton previously admitted.

“And after watching the film on that ‘fuck-off’ screen I thought, yeah, cutting it was probably the right decision!”

He later shared: “Originally, there was a closeup of Ray’s bell-end. But it would have punctured the tension and raised a laugh.”