Five Things We Learned from Lizzy Caplan’s Playboy Interview

Photo courtesy Playboy / Kurt Iswarienko

Lizzy Caplan has come a long way since she played the epitome of an early 2000's Goth and made us all develop a big lesbian crush on her in Mean Girls. Now, as part of the Emmy-nominated Showtime series Masters of Sex, Caplan is making us fall in love with her all over again as Virginia Johnson, one of the pioneers of the sexual revolution during the middle of the twentieth century.

AsPlayboy's July/August 20Q's subject, Caplan talks about the obvious things like her on-camera nudity, and some not-so-obvious things, like her admiration for men who wear tighty-whities.

On her comfort level when doing on-camera nudity:

"It's certainly not boring. They give us pretty intense stuff to do. A standard-issue sex scene is one thing, but standing completely naked and masturbating in front of someone is quite another. Arrgh. All that stuff we did in the second season is just now coming back to me."

On how she got through her first nude scene as an actress on True Blood (yes, that one with Ryan Kwanten):

"I think I drank Grey Goose, kept in the freezer from the night before and mixed into a bottle of Vitaminwater--a surprisingly delicious cocktail. I drank the entire bottle and had to get my stomach pumped. [laughs]. I don't know who told me the facts of life about doing nude scenes, but it was 'Do whatever you need to do to get through it.' I was encouraged to get loose. Unfortunately that's not an option on Masters, even for the more intimidating nude scenes, because they're always in the middle of the day, with nine pages of intense dialogue. For the True Blood scene I had to walk across a room wearing only tiny panties and climb on a guy, and that was it."

On what hasn't changed with women since the 1950s:

"The tough pills that women are expected to swallow have gotten better, but it's naive to think we've come that far from the 1950s. Women are still expected to accept a lower paycheck than a man for the same amount of work. And what about the difficulties every working mother faces, the stigma of leaving her child with a caregiver versus staying home and giving up her own dreams? There's nothing on our show around the feminist issues that I don't feel has a huge echo today. If anything, it makes me angry about today. [pauses] I've never said this out loud before, but I don't know if we'll get there in my lifetime. Until we can convince our own side--women--that this is a good thing for all of us, I don't see how we stand a chance convincing all the men."

On avoiding social media:

"I've never been on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace or Instagram. I know myself well enough to know that I would spend far too much time obsessing over a tweet or a photo or an opinion. I understand I'm part of a business, that it's not driven just by artistic integrity. You have to take into account the commerce. But being online is not my job. My job is to convince you that I'm somebody else. The less people know about me, the better I'm allowed to be at my job. I don't want to get a job because I have 500,000 Twitter followers. I want to get a job because I earned it."

On her fondness for men who wear tighty-whities:

"I like it when guys don't wear those boxer briefs that go to mid-thigh and look like bike shorts. It's harder and harder to find. They're very popular, but I think they look stupid. I prefer old-fashioned tighty-whities or even just boxer shorts. When you discover a man who wears tighty-whities, you hold on to him. It's so old-school. They're great."

Read the rest of Caplan's interview with Playboy and, of course, see her steamy pictures, here. Season three of Masters of Sex premieres July 12.