Cut or Uncut? How Much of Alexander Skarsgård’s (Fake) Penis Are ‘Pillion’ Viewers Getting at Home?

Alexander Skarsgard and Harry Melling in Pillion A24

This week, A24 released the home video version of the award-winning indie film Pillion, a tonally daring gay romantic drama adapted from the cult 2020 novel Box Hill.

Subtitled “A Story of Low Self-Esteem,” the novel by Adam Mars-Jones — who co-wrote Pillion’s script with director Harry Lighton — chronicles the ups and downs of a BDSM relationship between kink newbie Colin and strapping sadist biker Ray, an often leather-clad (and un-clad) statuesque disciplinarian right out of a Tom of Finland fantasy.

The theatrical version which opened in early February in the U.S., and played until recently nationwide, stars Harry Melling as the besotted Colin and Hollywood’s current perverse, pansexual demigod on speed-dial, Alexander Skarsgård, as Ray. That version had lingering shots of Ray’s penis (a lifelike, girthy prosthetic), extended — and unusually graphic for mainstream — depictions of sex between the leads, and a hefty amount of Dolby-enhanced grunting and moaning.

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But is that the version of Pillion landing on PVOD (Premium Video on Demand) and SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) starting this week?

Indie film distributor Jasper Basch spoke for many fans of the film when he expressed his concerns on an X post last week: “PSA: The ‘Pillion’ you get at home will be an edited down version of the ‘Pillion’ you saw in theaters, which presumably would have been rated NC-17. The home video movie ‘Pillion’ just got its R rating, after edits, and is officially now the only version titled ‘Pillion.’”

Basch had been worried about the integrity of “Pillion” since the theatrical release. Back in February, he had posted “Pillion going out Not Rated instead of NC-17… We used to be a real country where movies were allowed to be NC-17.”

That brief post neatly summarizes three key issues in modern free distribution and fandom: How many versions exist of each film being released? Which one are we watching at any given time? And was there really an earlier time, especially in the U.S., when standards-driven censorship of content was different, more lax, less infantilizing of audiences?

Pillion is a good case study. Back in February, Entertainment Weekly reported that “Alexander Skarsgård’s (prosthetic) penis close-up got trimmed down,” even before the supposedly Not Rated theatrical release.

“There was one shot that went, and that was not because Harry Lighton got nervous,” Melling told EW at the time during a joint interview with Skarsgård. “In the alleyway scene, there was a close-up on Ray’s penis as he sort of zipped down, and I think when they started to preview to audiences, they realized that this was a moment where the audience would react, and the tension would be released with laughter or what have you.”

Melling was addressing rumors that there had been an original, pre-festival cut of Pillion that was “raunchier” than the version that was shown at Cannes in May 2025.

These rumors originated with the cast and crew itself. In various junket interviews they had hyped cut scenes of “a close up of a dick, a hard dick” aiming “down the barrel of the lens” (Lighton said this) as part of this “raunchier version” of Pillion.

“What you’ve seen [at Cannes] is the family-friendly version,” Skarsgård joked. “There’s also the Alexander Skarsgård cut,” he added. A few months later editor Gareth C. Scales told the Vancouver International Film Festival that they had seen a version “rated NC-17 by the MPA,” and that they were working on trying to “secure an R rating for wider release” because the MPA “told A24 the sex scenes felt ‘too realistic.’”

So, how many versions of Pillion are there? What are they rated? And which one will you be watching on HBO Max, VOD, maybe Criterion at some point, perhaps Kanopy or (gasp) Tubi? How about during a long flight?

The Hollywood Reporter spoke to sources close to the production, who insist there are only two main versions of the film.

One is the Not Rated version, which was shown at festivals and then opened theatrically in February, and has the director-approved amount of prosthetic penis, butts, sex sounds and consistency of (prop) semen on Melling’s radiant post-coital face. (Lighton reportedly said some of the MPA requested changes involving “de-shining” that particular substance.)

The second version is the one that obtained an R rating (“for sexual content, graphic nudity, and language.”) from the MPA (certificate #55946) last week.

Requested changes reportedly involved the amount of sexual content in the alley oral sex scene, the film’s signature wrestling scene, and the biker picnic sequence. The changes were described by people close to the production as “light edits” both of visuals and sounds.

According to these sources, regardless of previous misreporting (or joking by cast and/or crew), there was never an NC-17 (or a Skarsgård) cut of the film. HBO Max, as the first exclusive streamer for SVOD, has the option to run both the Not Rated and the R-rated version. All other platforms and PVOD should be running the Not Rated version.

This is not the first time that anxiety over Alexander Skarsgård’s synthetic manhood — and its fake secretions — has resulted in dual versions of a film. In 2022, the MPA gave Brandon Cronenberg four options for his Infinity Pool: take an NC-17 rating, take the Not Rated route, formally appeal the NC-17, or edit it down to an R.

Alexander Skarsgård in Infinity Pool. Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection

As the New York Times pointed out at the time, “what followed was months of trimming, swapping, obscuring and negotiating, all in the hopes that an edited version would strike the Motion Picture Association’s board of raters as less, well, disgusting.” This eventually resulted in a slightly different, R-rated version showing up in theaters in early 2023, shortly after the Not Rated version had wowed critics at Sundance. “The total time off of the movie is probably like five seconds,” ratings consultant Ethan Noble — who had been hired by distributor Neon to shepherd the process — told the Times (other accounts peg it at 90 seconds). “It’s not a very big difference at all.” The five seconds in question? Skarsgård’s character James ejaculating at the beach after a sudden handjob by Mia Goth’s freewheeling Gabi.

“An R-rated film simply could not show ejaculation,” the Times reported that Cronenberg had shared about the notoriously opaque negotiation process with the MPA to dodge the dreaded NC-17. (Cronenberg added that some “tweaks” were also made to some scenes of violence and to the film’s thematic centerpiece, a trippy orgy scene.)

At the time, the dual versions of Infinity Pool — and questions about which one would end up on VOD, streaming and physical media — generated much chatter among the Letterboxderatti. Several confusing accounts about which version different audiences had seen tried to parse how much of Skarsgård’s prosthetic and the “money shot” was depicted. “From what I saw, it was definitely uncut [eggplant emoji],” punned a quippy r/horror redditor.

Neon has had some experience trying to navigate the murky waters of the current Multiverse of Versions Madness, trying to keep track of a plethora of versions and outlets with contradictory sexual content policies — as well as not invoking the wrath of cinephiles who enjoy controversial content and see themselves as protectors of artistic integrity.

In 2021, the release of porn industry-themed drama Pleasure got delayed because A24, the initial acquiring distributor of the Not Rated version, reportedly dropped the film after requesting an alternate R-rated cut from first-time Swedish director Ninja Thyberg. Neon picked it up with a commitment to stand by the Not Rated cut alone. “I’m happy and relieved that my debut and life’s work is in the hands of Neon who dare to launch the film with my original vision, raw and uncut, to the American audience,” Thyberg said in a statement at the time.

Sofia Kappel in Pleasure. A24/Courtesy Everett Collection

Pleasure is currently available on popular freemium service Tubi, and viewers have reported that that version is missing content from the theatrical cut. Records show that even though Neon stuck by Thyberg’s “raw and uncut” vision from the March 2022 U.S. theatrical release until the July 2022 video release, an alternate version was cut at the same time, which obtained an R rating from MPA in August of the same year (certificate #54015), and it is likely the version shown on Tubi.

And add to the confusion, the airplane versions. Some flyers last month, for example, were treated to a version of Lionsgate’s erotic thriller The Housemaid which delivered the thriller but seriously toned down the erotic. An easy comparison with the version available concurrently on PPOV showed the omission of Sidney Sweeney’s partial nudity in the steamy scenes that helped turn Paul Feig’s rebooting of the 1990s erotic thriller into one of the year’s megahits.

Sydney Sweeney in The Housemaid. Daniel McFadden/Lionsgate/Courtesy Everett Collection

Compared to the 1990s — when studios had to worry mainly about theatrical, home video, cable and broadcast — the distribution model in 2026 seems much more confusing. A distributor summarized the situation as “chaotic.”

In the 1990s, there were maybe 5-10 core versions of each title, and mostly physical. Now, even if there are still only a few differently rated versions, the same title could result in 40 to over a hundred distinct versions for other reasons, and most are delivered digitally. There are still a similar number of theatrical cuts (delivered as multiple Digital Cinema Packages, or DCPs), but also several television versions (multiple frame rates, ratios, etc.), home video versions (standard and for collector markets), international versions, airline and speciality versions, versions with different levels of accessibility, plus several others.

(Helping make sense of some of this chaos is the adoptions of Interoperable Master Format, or IMF, described as “a file-based media format that simplifies the delivery and storage of audio-visual masters intended for multiple territories and platforms” and “particularly well-adapted for delivery to today’s global content platforms.”)

Another contrast with the pre-streaming era is that back then the MPA ruled supreme for the theatrical handling of controversial titles, broadcast and basic cable TV standards were much clearer, and the explosion of premium cable and PPV in the 1980s offered outlets for uncut films with sexual content.

People rolled their eyes in the early 2000s when Utah-based Clean Flix offered wholesome edited versions of popular feature films for conservative audiences, removing anything they deemed unacceptable. As THR reported at the time, 16 prominent directors — including Steven Spielberg and Robert Redford — and entertainment studios like Disney, Sony, Universal, Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox, sued Clean Flix for copyright infringement, and the company folded among widespread mockery in 2006.

In the current streaming era, things are much more unclear, and they also mutate with Cronenbergian slipperiness. For example, Netflix quietly showed for several years the 2-D version of Gaspar Noé’s 2015 sexually explicit 3-D dramedy Love. The very much unrated film — showing unsimulated full penetration and ejaculation — streamed from 2017 until well into 2020. (Confusingly enough, Netflix also streamed the hip L.A. twentysomething comedy series Love at the same time, resulting in many hip twentysomethings accidentally finding Noé’s arthouse erotica title and hyping it on TikTok as “ZOMG Porn on Netflix!”). But after the conservative-driven controversy surrounding the French coming-of-age drama “Cuties,” it seems unlikely Netflix would risk streaming anything remotely as explicit as Noé’s Love now.

The Criterion Channel — like the original arthouse theaters in the 1950s and early 1960s — seems to get “the artsy pass” to show explicit sex scenes. They are currently streaming several of the brilliant French films of Catherine Breillat, including the uncut version of “Romance,” with the unsimulated explicit scenes intact.

Meanwhile, over at Disney+, it was reported that the streamer had quietly decided to remove almost an entire minute from the 1971 action classic The French Connection, plus a plot-significant instance of the protagonist Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) using the n-word. The stealthily sanitized version was apparently also delivered to the Criterion Channel, to the chagrin of its cinephile audience.

Regardless of which version (or versions?) of Pillion ends up on your home screen, we do seem to have moved away from our earlier certainty that the movie you were watching was the movie its creators (or the director, if you’re adamantly auteurist) wanted us to see.