Jennifer Connelly wishes actors wouldn’t get embarrassed by sex scenes. The Oscar-winning actress admits getting intimate with a co-star is awkward, but insists it’s nowhere near as bad as everyone makes it out to be.

“Sex scenes are incredibly awkward, they’re always uncomfortable. I think they’re overused and people get very flustered by them,” Connelly said. “People don’t know how to discuss them and there’s a lot of embarrassment. It’s not my favorite thing to do, but there are circumstances in which they make sense. I just wish people wouldn’t dance around them.”

The 38-year-old star’s next film, Creation, sees her starring alongside her real-life husband Paul Bettany, who plays evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin.

But even though the couple play a husband and wife in the film, they didn’t shoot any steamy scenes together, something Jennifer is grateful for. “We had heard a lot of opinions about it but I wanted to work with Paul because he’s a very good actor and I thought it would be a privilege to work with him,” she told Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

“There are certain scenarios people don’t want to see, like a married couple having sex in a film. But I don’t want to see a sexy movie about Charles Darwin, and the filmmakers didn’t want to make that film, so it seemed like there was nothing about our personal pairing that could take away from the film.”