Andrea Lewis And Jamal Dedeaux Of Hulu's 'Three Ways' Open Up About Safe Sex On Set

For actress Andrea Lewis, who plays Stacey, the film was an opportunity to gain perspective on the different types of relationship styles. “I love hearing the discussions around monogamy or polyamory, just hearing the different opinions,” she says. “I've always been just a really open-minded person in terms of hearing others' experiences.”

Three Ways also brought on a new challenge for Lewis, the Degrassi: The Next Generation actress who has been acting for over two decades now. “It was definitely my first time experiencing something so spicy,” she says, dealing with the raunchy subject matter. She says that she and other actresses she works with discuss all the time how to approach sex scenes in their work. “It's always a variety of opinions in terms of some people are comfortable [with sex scenes], some people are not. Some people hope they never get something like this because it takes a lot of vulnerability.”

Working on the set of Three Ways, Lewis says she felt completely safe doing intimate scenes. “We had an intimacy coordinator, Tatiana, and she said it best: you can change your mind the whole time. There is nothing here that's like, you have to do it. You can say, I don't wanna do this, or I thought I would, and now that we're in the midst of it, it's making me uncomfortable.”

For his part, Dedeaux was deliberate about making the actresses feel as comfortable as possible to do their love scenes. “One thing I did was made sure we surrounded the set with women,” he says. “Every shot in the sex scene was storyboarded, or was it shot listed.”

“Ultimately, it requires choreography. It requires people to be very comfortable with each other, and it's definitely absolutely not as sexy as people [think],” Lewis says.

Three Ways arrives nearly a decade after Lewis released her cult classic web series Black Actress, where she plays a young Black woman frustrated with the film and television industry. With this latest film and a string of other personal projects, including a forthcoming docu-series called The Black Beauty Effect, Lewis has experienced what she describes as the dramatic shift that has taken place in Hollywood in the past several years.

“Black women in general in media have been very aggressive about wanting to see ourselves,” she says. “Now we’re getting to this place where not only are we getting a lot of diversity with representation, the focus is on how authentic we actually feel and look, it's like people really wanna see you looking like a Black woman.”

Three Ways is streaming on Hulu.