American Gods season 1 episode 1: How they pulled off that bonkers sex scene

The scene is deemed an iconic moment from Neil Gaiman's source material

The adaptation of Neil Gaiman's 2001 novel American Gods has arrived, premiering in both the US and UK yesterday (1 May).

Ricky Whittle stars in the lead role as Shadow Moon, a character thrust into the world of the mystical Gods after a chance encounter with Wednesday, who is played by a scene-stealing Ian McShane.

The eight-part series looks to give Game of Thrones a run for its money on the adult content, something hammered home by a scene in its debut episode which saw a defining moment from the book immortalised on screen: the one which sees goddess Bilquis (Yetide Badaki) devour her sexual partner.

If you watched the scene wondering how on earth executive producers Bryan Fuller and Michael Green pulled off the incredibly-directed scene (shout out to David Slade), just know that it involved a trap door, visual effects and what Vanity Fair describes as “carefully-timed choreography.”

Fuller revealed to EW how the American Gods team brought one of the novel's most iconic scenes to life.

“Looking at the scene in the book, the orgasm and the realisation of what’s happening is primarily told from the suitor’s point of view, and what was so interesting about bringing [director] David Slade into the project, for both Michael and I, was how we were approaching this almost entirely as a point-of-view scene, and David came in very naturalistically, relatively, and saw it for the physics equation that it was, in terms of how does one person fit inside of another?

“He really led us down this really interesting path of Bilquis growing in a very subtle way, distorting perspectives as a means of conveying sex, and in cinema, using those tools and extrapolating a weird, hypno-shag adventure in sexual worship.”

Green praised Joel Murray, the actor who played the role of Bilquis' suitor.

“We wrote the role of the suitor... as someone who was coming to this awkwardly and with vulnerability. It wasn’t necessarily an excited, gonna-get-laid guy, but a guy who was nervously approaching the date, wasn’t sure where it was going to go, and was surprised to be found attractive. That let us turn it into this moment of pure worship - an ecstatic form of worship that we could experience from his point of view.

The producers confirmed that Murray stepped into the role when the actor who had been cast originally dropped out at the last minute unexpectedly.

“[Joel] came in very late to the process. We were inside of two weeks, maybe, before filming, and we hadn’t had that done, and not surprisingly, not too many people who were serious enough actors to want to do it would be willing to be that vulnerable.

“The scene is bananas, and there’s the degree of nudity… but Joel Murray was someone who our casting directors came with, and we’ve all seen him in a million things, and we could instantly see how the scene was going to end up being so much sweeter with him playing it. We were really grateful.”

American Gods, which also stars Emily Browning and Bruce Langley, airs weekly in the UK on Amazon Prime