‘Spartacus” is this year’s most notorious flesh-and-blood series.
And you won’t have to wait long for that; the flesh arrives six minutes into the first of the Starz drama’s 13 episodes, which premiered last night.
In the scene, Thracian he-man Spartacus, played by Welsh-born actor Andy Whitfield, is making love to his wife.
The camera lovingly pans down their writhing naked bodies. Sex scenes, in fact, come at regular intervals in the series premiere, with full-frontal female nudity 18 minutes into the one-hour episode.
In the drama, Spartacus becomes enslaved by the Capuan army and trains to be a gladiator in a school run by the sex-starved Lucretia, played by Lucy Lawless, so memorable from “Xena, Warrior Princess.”
During the eight-month shoot, the cast grew accustomed to being naked. “I think I got some memo that said, ‘You’re going to be naked a lot,’ ” says Whitfield. Lawless jokes that the nudity was contracted.
“We hope nothing else is contracted,” she says.
No matter how often you film a bedroom romp, they make for awkward filming, the co-stars say.
“They’re a little embarrassing. You just dive in and make the moment as real as possible,” Whit- field says.
“There’s always a [pro- tective] layer between bodies,” Lawless says.
“You choreograph them well in advance. There’s a lot of talking beforehand, then you say, ‘OK. Let’s do it,’ ” Whitfield says.
“But then you look up and there’s some guy [on the crew] watching who says, ‘I operate the fan,’ and you say, ‘Well, turn it on and get out.’ ”
Eventually, the thrill of seeing naked bodies during 12-hour production days wears off for the crew.
“Even the grips, these great big hetero crew men, could not give a fat rat about filming another sex scene,” Lawless notes.
“It’s really something when these great, big, burly gentlemen say, ‘I’m going to be ill if I have to look at another bosom.’ ”
Whitfield notes that “Spartacus” fans who’ve complained on the Internet that the series only shows full frontal female nudity will get their fair share of male genitalia. “It’s coming,” he says.
“When the guys are naked, they’re being inspected by these hags, like horseflesh, for participation in the gladiator games,” Lawless says.
“It’s an abuse of power. You don’t think, ‘Oh, my goodness, there’s a naked man.’ You just feel their honor amidst degradation.”
“Spartacus” has already been renewed for a second season and producers have recalled the actors who do the most cursing in the original series to re-read their dialogue for a PG version of the show.
Still, that won’t be enough for Whitfield’s 5-year-old son, Jesse, to see the show. Whitfield reveals that Jesse was “bitterly disappointed” when he learned his dad wasn’t playing Sportacus, the action hero of the Nickelodeon series, “LazyTown.”
“Now he calls me Sparty-pants,” Whitfield says.