Naomi Watts opened up about the first time she and her husband Billy Crudup had sex — and the moment that left her feeling “mortified.”
“I’m not going to embarrass him and talk about it in depth on live TV, but I was mortified because I had my patch on,” Watts, 56, said while appearing on The Drew Barrymore Show on Monday, January 27. The actress was referencing a transdermal skin patch she wore to help alleviate some menopause symptoms.
“If anyone’s ever worn a patch, you know that they’re very sticky, the adhesive takes ages to get off,” she continued. “In fact, my first doctor that told me to wear the patch said just use car oil, that’ll be fine. And I’m like, ‘I don’t want to use car oil on my body.’”
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Watts — who also detailed the awkward sexual experience in her memoir Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause — opted to just take the patch off the best way she could, despite the “nasty mark” it left on her skin. When it was clear things were escalating, she said she “excused myself, ran off to the bathroom and panicked, like, ‘What am I gonna do? And I’m scratching away.”
Host Drew Barrymore interjected, “Because you’ve got the gray, gummy outline?”
“Yes! I probably [had] a couple of them on both sides,” Watts replied. “And I was in there too long, and then came out sort of like that, frantic, and he said, ‘Are you okay, are you not in the mood?”
An embarrassed Watts decided to come clean. “I said, ‘No, I just, well, look, I’m in menopause and I have treatment and I have this patch and I’m wearing it and it leaves this… I’m old, should I just leave?”
To his credit, Crudup’s response was excellent. “I was trying my best to apologize and I was shrinking and he was like, ‘We’re the same age. We’re the same age. What is this? This is science. How can I help?”
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Watts and Crudup married in June 2023 after getting engaged that same year in April. “A big A-list wedding just didn’t seem right; they never wanted that,” a source told Us at the time. “They actually went to a friend’s birthday party in their wedding attire. There were a lot of congratulations going on, that’s for sure.”
