‘I look like a thumb in my Rivals sex scene – I orgasm with my chin’

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Rivals returns this month with a darker variety of episodes than fans are used to, after the death of (spoiler!) Lady Monica Baddingham. But fear not Rutshire revellers, there is still a decent amount of horseplay in these coming (ahem) episodes, much of it revolving around Lizzie and Freddie, as well as his wife Valerie. It turns out our unlucky leading man Freddie (Danny Dyer) is still getting it on with his very un-self-aware wife Valerie (Lisa McGrillis), all while having an affair with Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson). Not only that, he’s reusing his bedroom moves on each of them, to hilarious effect. When Metro spoke to the cast about the scenes, Dyer admitted it shows ‘a bit of the flaw in his character’, but Parkinson described it as ‘incredibly truthful’. I suspect fans will call it either way. The manoeuvre in question (I shan’t spoil it) was rather vague in the script, so the actors crafted it between them. ‘Lizzie shows Freddie a little move, and then Freddie passes it on to Val and it sends Val insane,’ says Dyer. It does. It also got my biggest laugh from the first three episodes. Much of the Rivals ruting concerns Freddie, Lizzie and Valerie in these new episodes (Picture: Disney Plus/Robert Viglasky Photography) Lisa McGrillis says the writers provided an insight into why Valerie is the way she is (Picture: Disney Plus/Robert Viglasky Photography) McGrillis had a slightly different reaction watching it back. ‘I was like, “Oh my God, is that my actual orgasm face?” I look like a worm. Or a thumb. I’m sort of orgasming with my chin,’ she says, acting out the melding of her neck into her face (enjoy the video above). ‘I did a full backbend. I don’t know what I was doing,’ she adds. It wasn’t just the scene itself. The 44-year-old explains that the team wanted the orgasm to go on longer and sort of float out the window, so she had to go in and re-record the audio for her orgasm, in what might be the most Rivals thing ever. Lizzie’s marriage is very different to Freddie’s… It would have been too easy to make them both these despicable spouses Quote Quote Given that the Disney Plus romp has touted itself as the home of equal opportunity nudity, McGrillis wasn’t alone in laying it all out there. Dyer’s Freddie at one point has to flee a house stark bollock naked, after canoodling with Lizzie in a bath. Was that a body double, you might wonder? He wasn’t allowed one. ‘You’ve got to get on with these things,’ says Dyer, who says he tried to exit the bath ‘gracefully’, but it’s a tough ask. ‘I’m glad they didn’t show that shot of me climbing out the window with my arse up in the air because it was awful,’ he says. Danny Dyer decided to get a spray tan before filming Freddie’s bath scene with Lizzie (Picture: Disney Plus/Robert Viglasky Photography) McGrillis says she had to re-record the audio of her orgasm to make it longer (Picture: Disney Plus/Robert Viglasky Photography) ‘I made a mistake by having a spray tan, and then realised I had to sit in a bath for three hours. So when I jumped out of the bath, obviously I was sort of brown from my chest up and white as a sheet for the rest of me.’ Parkinson, meanwhile, was left sitting in watery remnants of said fake tan. ‘I didn’t know, so I couldn’t understand why the water was brown,’ she says. A byproduct of the bedroom farce is that Valerie, who has so far been this rather awful, on-the-make character with a penchant for body-shaming her family, softens (even if she is still all those other things too). McGrillis says these episodes provide a peek underneath Valerie’s hairsprayed bouffant and huge frocks, showing why she is that way. ‘There always has to be some sort of insecurity or vulnerability within them,’ she says. Will they find out about Freddie and Lizzie’s affair? (Picture: Disney Plus/Robert Viglasky Photography) ‘It’s nice to hate a character, but it’s also nice if you can feel sorry for them and understand why they are the way they are.’ While that might be the case for Valerie, Parkinson says that Lizzie’s husband James (Oliver Chris) isn’t quite so redeemable. She describes an ‘essential sweetness’ to McGrillis’s depiction…but then does use the word ‘despicable’ when contemplating her own character’s marriage. ‘You get the sense with James that he really is quite a selfish husband, and I think as a viewer you want her to leave,’ Parkinson says. Although it can only spell doom for Valerie, just when we’ve come around to her. 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