After working with Gregg Araki and Karely Sciortino on their latest collaboration, Olivia Wilde has developed a whole new respect for BDSM.
During Friday’s world premiere of I Want Your Sex at Sundance Film Festival, the actress praised Sciortino, who co-wrote the film with director Araki, for connecting her with dominatrix friends to prep for her role as a Erika Tracy, an artist and provocateur who enlists her assistant Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) as her sexual submissive.
“Karley was instrumental because this spec script was hers, and she developed this movie with Gregg. She gave me so much insight into the dom community,” she explained. “She really connected me, through friends of hers, to studying with some amazing people who kind of brought me into that world and allowed me to have such an education and allowed me to have even more respect for people working on the fringes of that world. It’s just fascinating.”
Wilde continued, “So for me, it was also this kind of anthropological journey of learning, and Karley was incredibly gracious. We laughed so hard making this, and yet, I walked away from it feeling like I really learned something valuable.”
Sciortino, the Slutever sexual expert who previously collaborated with Araki on the 2019 Starz series Now Apocalypse, explained that she and the director had “been writing the script now for over a decade” after it originally featured an older man with a younger woman.
“And we were like, ‘You know what?’” she recalled. “‘In a post-Me Too world, it might be actually more interesting and sort of transgressive to explore an older woman and a younger man, and what does that sexual relationship look like?’
“I think that anyone who’s sexually adventurous or has ever made a really chaotic sexual choice, and it turned out for the better, even if it vaguely blew up their life, I feel like they’ll like this movie,” added Sciortino.
