I Want Your Sex

Sex is back, baby! In the fun new movie I Want Your Sex, Olivia Wilde plays Erika, a mixed-media artist who enters into a very consensual, very kinky, but very unprofessional sub/dom relationship with her assistant Elliot (Cooper Hoffman). Elliot’s having the time of his life, but Erika is a lot, and soon his life starts to fall apart. I Want Your Sex is directed by Gregg Araki and the film doubles down on his brand of fun, in-your-face sexuality he’s known for. If you want more great films about sex, check out: ‘The Invite’ is a marriage comedy with sex and heart https://www.npr.org/2026/07/13/nx-s1-5887485/the-invite-is-a-marriage-comedy-with-sex-and-heart In ‘Pillion,’ submission is the mission https://www.npr.org/2026/02/16/nx-s1-5712656/in-pillion-submission-is-the-mission What makes a good sex scene? https://www.npr.org/2024/04/25/1197964002/what-makes-a-good-sex-scene Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour: Letterboxd https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/ / Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pchh Our weekly newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/pop-culture Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Speaker 01

  Ooh, sex is back, baby. It is back.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  In the very fun new movie, I Want Your Sex, Olivia Wilde plays a mixed media artist named Erica, who enters into a very consensual and very kinky, but very unprofessional subdom relationship with her assistant Elliot. He's a directionless kid just out of college, and he's played by Cooper Hoffman. Elliot is having the time of his life, exploring his every fantasy. But Erica is a lot, and soon Elliot's life starts to fall apart. It's directed by Gregg Araki, and it doubles down on the fun, in-your-face sexuality he's known for. So we will be talking about sex on this episode of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. I'm Glen Weldon. Joining me today is my co-host, Aisha Harris. Hey, Ayesha.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Hey, Glenn.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Also with us is NPR producer Mark Rivers. Hey, Mark.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me, guys.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Ayesha, let's start with you. What'd you think?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Ooh, sex is back, baby. It is back. If this movie is any indication of that, and also, of course, the invite, which we've talked about on this show, I really, really dug this. This is a movie that, like, there are no lines to cross. There's no lines to bend. Like, everything's just like a mass puddle, like fluid circles.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  In every sense.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  And that's what I love about it. It's like a very tricky tightrope to walk when you're talking about sex, and especially when you're talking about sex in the manner that Araki and his co-writer, Carly Shortino, are. This is a movie in which ethics don't exist for certain characters in ways that are really kind of unsettling and hard to process. But it also makes it fun. And that, I think, is something that has been missing with a lot of works that are about sex and sexuality and coming-of-age stories in that way. I recently watched Pillion for the first time, and I feel like it would be interesting to put that movie up against this. Very different, but also some similarities

• 2:12Speaker 01

  in terms of, like, older person with younger person, and BDSM and BDSM-adjacent things. But yeah, I enjoyed it. It's fun, and I'm very excited to dig into this more with you both here.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Great. What about you, Mark?

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I'm gonna say something I feel like I haven't gotten to say in quite a long time on this podcast, which is, I liked it.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, right?

• 2:33Speaker 03

  It's very funny. It's well acted. It comes from a real POV. Ayesha, you mentioned this tightrope that is walking. I feel like Gregg Araki is just like doing pirouettes on this tightrope. He's really enjoying being on this tightrope. It feels like such a refreshing rebuke to so many sad things in this movie culture that we have, where so many films are gray and dreary. This movie just pops with color, right? While many stories have the sex kind of sapped out of them, you have this supremely sexy performance from Olivia Wilde. I think about all these other shows and films where the sex kind of acts as trauma. You know, sex is pain. You know, something like Euphoria, or in White Lotus, where sex, if it's there, is kind of this emblem of a kind of spiritual emptiness, you know? And Araki is here to say, no, no, sex can be fun.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Sex can be exciting. Sex can teach you a lot about yourself. Yes, you might get hurt, but you know, that's what life is like. You know, life, you get hurt. And so I like that it's not shying away from those things. I don't know if it sticks the landing. I feel that the movie kind of takes very hard pivots away from darker emotional terrain, particularly with regards to Chase Suiwonders, who plays Hoffman's roommate in the film. The movie gestures towards more emotionally complex ideas or plot threads, and kind of pulls away, which I was a little disappointed by. But I think that's kind of part of Araki's overall design, which is, this is kind of supposed to go down pretty easily. Let's not overthink this. This is a romp, you know? And for that, I think it works.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Okay. I also thought this was a lot of fun. It is so bright and messy. It's got a very playful sense of humor. It's more sexual than sexy for me. And it is satiric in a broadside of the barn kind of satiric. And that's very Gregg Araki. I mean, Araki was one of the main voices in the new queer cinema of the 90s.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  I think this is probably his most conventional film in a while. The last thing I saw of him, though, was the series called Now Apocalypse, which was a mess, threw a lot of things at every available wall and floor and ceiling and window, but it was never anything less than interesting. Kind of like this. It is very identifiably him.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  He cannot make an uninteresting movie.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  This is the thing. I think, though, what I'm gonna remember most from this particular film is the performance. This is basically a two-hander. And I kept admiring how much that Hoffman and Wilde were elevating what could be, on the page, kind of a clunky script. I mean, the amount of times someone makes a pronouncement in this movie. This is what art is for. This is what sex is for. This is what's wrong with your generation. This is what my generation is like this because X, Y, and Z. All that stuff could really just thud. But I was always impressed by how much life both Wilde and Hoffman were giving those lines, like how conversational they made it. Wilde in particular. This character is a type, but the performance isn't. I mean, we really get to see layers of Erica, what's beneath that veneer of control.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  She really sees something in Elliot that she, yes, wants to manipulate, but you don't deny that she sees it.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  She sees something in Elliot that maybe I didn't always see. But Elliot, too, you really get a sense of his affection for his best friend, Apple. You mentioned, played by Chase Suiwonders. That felt real to me. I was really impressed by this. But again, I'm coming back to the acting more than anything else.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, Olivia Wilde seems to be channeling, like, I see her as the bossy bitch attitude of Regina George in Mean Girls, and marrying it with this extremely sex-positive and adventurous nature of Samantha Jones in Sex and the City.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  Also a little femme fatale in there as well.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little femme fatale. And that's, that also kind of goes back to what you were talking about, Mark, the structure and kind of how it tries to stick the landing, because it does kind of also, it's a romp, it's a farce, it's a sex comedy. But then there's also like this framing, maybe like a film noir-ish or like a...

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, kind of Sunset Boulevard.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Exactly. But I think what the performance is, yes, they are really elevating it. And you're seeing these conversations happen about, you know, contemporary art and satirizing all of that stuff. I do think to some extent, though, like, I still would say that what I find just so interesting about it is even with all of the clunkiness, there's something real that it's trying to get at here.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  You know, I've seen Gregg Araki's teen apocalypse trilogy, those movies which came out in the 90s, Totally F'd Up, The Doom Generation, Nowhere. All of those movies, plus a movie like The Living End, which came before that in 1992, like, they are all kind of operating in the shadow of and in the midst of the, you know, AIDS, HIV crisis, all of those things. And they have this very nihilistic tendency towards them. Sometimes there's aliens. Literally, it's like, everything is doomed. And it's interesting to see him kind of evolve over the... I've kind of come back here and there. I haven't followed his career completely. But it has been interesting to see him sort of shift with each, like, sexual era.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  And this era has been one that seems like it is repressive in many ways, but also like there's a lot more freedom at the same time. And so that tension, I think, is still very clear in those conversations that they're having about like what Gen Z versus, you know, Olivia Wilde, I guess, is kind of a millennial or elder millennial.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Sure, yeah.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  I just found that really fascinating to look at, and the fact that it does make this fun and not like, trauma is not really a thing that is being explored here. It's just like, how do you grow from just being a person in the world and maybe getting taken advantage of? But also, like, that's not gonna necessarily derail your entire life.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  I think about an exchange in the film where, between, I think, Cooper Hoffman and the roommate character, where the roommate asks, you know, what's the difference between this and porn? Like, Olivia Wilde's work? And he says, I don't know, lighting, context. And that felt very meta. I mean, I mean, Araki, as you're getting at, Ayesha, like, this is someone who's thought a lot about sex in certain, various contexts. You know, sex in the context of the AIDS crisis, right? And now he's thinking about sex in this context of what has been reportedly been like a sexless time in our culture, right? You see all these stories and reports of how the youth are having less sex. And I think Araki's thinking about, like, just what sex means under that, under that kind of climate. I'm very interested in just how much more optimistic this film is than in previous films. Like, this is, there is very little nihilism in this, even when there's room for it.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  You know, like, there is room for darkness in this story. And it is more hopeful. I think it is more optimistic. And it does feel like he is talking directly, maybe he's doing this, and he's kind of getting on his soapbox, but it does feel like he is talking directly to a generation, or directly to the youth in a way. And I appreciate what he's saying.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is a great point. We'll have more of our thoughts about I Want Your Sex after this very quick break.

• 9:16Speaker 00

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• 10:21Speaker 02

  And we're back. The classic Dig of Iraqi is even with all the nihilism. His stuff is so playful and fun that it can come off as glib and cartoonish and even slight.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  Almost juvenile.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Right. You don't hire Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville to play cops if you want them to disappear into their parts. Right? There are several moments in this movie that I want to ask you about, like Elliot's sexual fantasies. Our literal cartoons, his sex life with his girlfriend Minerva, who is played, we should mention, by Charlie XCX.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  The brat herself.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Is cartoonishly bad.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Did you guys roll with that or did that take you out?

• 10:56Speaker 03

  It's like watching a Spike film and not getting that double dolly shot. Like, I know, I know you're gonna get that, like, cartoonish stuff in Iraqi's movies. And I kind of roll with it because this was not the work of AI. You know, this is someone's personal vision on the screen. I think even the Teen Apocalypse trilogy, there's stuff in there where I think I'm watching an adult cartoon almost. Not necessarily in a bad way, but he's, he's using different modes of media to kind of, to express the interiority of the characters, even though it is silly. I think it works in this world. The world is absurd. The world is kind of ridiculous and a little bit goofy. I wasn't taken out of it. It kind of brought me further in. I was like, oh, someone's doing this. Like, this is by design. This is not just some automaton at work here.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think that one of the aims of an Iraqi project tends to be to tap into that off-kilterness. You want to always feel kind of destabilized. Or maybe you don't want to, but that is what he's going to be giving you.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  He's gonna force it upon you.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  That is, that is the point. And so if you're not familiar with his work, then I can understand being kind of thrown off by what is happening. And it is the type of movie that kind of has to teach you how to watch it. And I enjoy those challenges. I'm also thinking of something like Boots Riley, where it's like, you're either gonna ride with this or you're not. And I think if you get into this within 10, 15 minutes, you've gotten past the sort of copping around different storylines and finally settling into its groove, the cartoonish nature of things and just the sort of deadpan, the way that Minerva, the Charlie XCX character, is just like this deadpan, totally sexless, like, I don't really care about sex.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  She's the real villain of the, of the movie.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Who studies like this? She's studying for some medical degree or something and she's just sitting there, doesn't even have an high letter. I don't know, what, what are you studying, Charlie XCX? I don't know. That's the humor, right? That's the fun in that. And if you like that kind of stuff, you will ride with it.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  I do wonder, though, as sex positive as it is and as the fact that there is no sort of like traumatic thing going on here. I know Iraqi has talked about how he's sat with this idea for this story for years. And initially, it was actually the genders were reversed. And I do think that that plays a big part in why none of this, at least for me, felt. I mean, it definitely feels icky sometimes, but it also has sort of this sheen of like, he's gonna be okay. Like Cooper Hoffman's character is going to be okay. And how the Olivia Wilde character had been played by a man, I do wonder, like, that would have felt different and weird. And not that that's a bad thing, because I don't think everything should have a one-to-one correlation. Like, that's not the way real life works.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  But that does seem to be something, I think, that like, you can't ignore the fact that this would feel really different if the genders had been reversed as originally planned.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  We have to see the joy. We have to see the fun. Elliot is having a ball. We talked about the, the film Pillion, Ayesha.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  I talked about that movie on this podcast. And my main takeaway from that movie was, where's the fun? This is treated with such serious intensity.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  That the fun never came through. Like, we didn't understand why, why our main character in that movie was, kept coming back. Because it, it felt like something he was doing with such intensity and seriousness. This, you cannot ignore. You can't ignore, you can ignore nothing about this movie. This movie will not let you ignore it.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  It's in your face. Yeah, I mean, the tone, I mean, the tone of this movie is very interesting. It's definitely not realism. It's not a psychological movie. And there's that, there's another line that Olivia Wilde's character has where she says, you know, sex means everything and it means nothing. I don't have time to explain this to you. I think that is kind of the point of view of Iraqi here, where it's like.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  It should be the log line, yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Yes, the log line, where do not look for deeper meanings here. It's, do not overthink this, this is not a trauma plot. You know, it's like, have a good time, you know? And, and I do think we've been, we've been missing, been missing the good times when it comes to portrayals of sex in movies.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  To be fair to the script, we do see the Elliot character kind of have a break.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Like, he does. There are scenes where it happens.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Multiple small breakdowns, but he pushes back. And I think those moments are key to making sure it's not a completely smooth ride. Like, you see and you understand how he is coping with this. But again, the movie treats it as if this is just a part of growing up.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  This is what happens.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  I want to be very careful with my words here. I do not think Me Too, as a movement and culture, went too far. And this is not what I'm about to say.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  What I am saying is that I think there was a, especially in popular culture, there were a lot of attempts to wrestle with Me Too in many different ways, in some very interesting ways. But oftentimes, they could sometimes reduce it all to, this is the worst thing that could ever happen to me. This has trickled down into my life. That is a reality of certain types of abuse or just inappropriate relationships. There are also experiences that don't fall all the way on that side of the spectrum and that don't affect you. Or that, they might affect you in the moment, but then years later, you're like, you know what? I made decisions, maybe on my end too, that like, I could like, or I wouldn't make that decision now, but I learned from it. And I don't think we should shy away from being able to show those perspectives either.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  I think they're valid and then they can live alongside the ones that are far more consequential to who, like, who experienced them. And so that's what I like about this movie. It's not afraid to suggest that there's other alternatives.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, you need both. You need both portrayals, I feel.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  And this film is signaling to you from the opening frame, what take it has. I mean, let's talk about the production design. You mentioned the color, Mark. This movie bursts with color.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  It's so beautiful.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  In a way that films today's don't. I mean, and let's talk about Erica's art. It is tacky. It's supposed to be tacky. It feels also kind of blunt and very first drafty. It's kind of like Jeff Kuntz by way of the Robin Bird Show. It's not supposed to be this elevated thing. It's supposed to be the kind of grotty thing that it is.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  And she kind of knows that.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  She does. I mean, that's the point. But the entire production design of the movie, I mean, we see Elliot's apartment and it's meant to look crappy and like he's a broke student. But someone took the time to choose accent walls and rugs and bedspreads. And you're like, I mean, he's unhappy, but I mean, that's a nice space.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yes, especially, especially considering he's probably getting paid nothing at one point.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  It's even made clear, like, I mean, he's not getting paid a lot. Like, and that's because he's a 20-something, early 20-something, and who gets paid that much? You know? The production's design is beautiful. The Olivia Wilde's entire wardrobe for this film is just fantastic.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Oscar just for the costume.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  I mean, seriously, sometimes it feels like I'm watching, you know, like Madonna's sex. Even at one point, she's wearing what looks like the sort of like vinyl or latex, like red outfit. And I was just like, oh, man, I want that. Like, everything in this movie that she was wearing, almost everything, is like, I want that, I want that. Great, and great wigs, great wigs.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  And Iraqi's always been great at this. I think about just the white 2K pop already vibe of his movies in the 90s where like, just the fashion and that. And those movies also were just so bright, so colorful and so vivid and, and not quite real. But like, but like, not real in the best way.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  I do want to give another shout out to Chase Sweet, Wonders as Apple. She was also in the studio, so good in the studio. She played one of the employees of Sosseroogin's characters, like, sort of young, fresh, like, were pitching ideas on that team. But she is so good here as all of these characters, at least the ones we spend the most time with, are sort of dealing with sex and sexuality in their own terms. And she kind of gets short shrift at the, in the last part of the movie. But the first part of the movie, like, she is kind of another counter, like, whereas, you know, you have Cooper Hoffman, who's like very, very just obsessed with sex. And then the Charlie XCX character is the opposite. And then like, Apple's kind of in the middle where she's just like.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Figuring stuff out, yeah.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Just figuring stuff out. And she just has this like way about her as this character of being both cute, but like also like very relatable and just like a lot of 20-somethings you would expect to meet.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  You can kind of see on her face, like, different emotions kind of clashing at the same time. You know, and I think, I think in the film, she works as the best sort of flesh and blood avatar of what Iraqi's trying to get at with her generation, which is like this generation that is surrounded by sex and surrounded often by very unhealthy depictions of sex, while not truly getting to grapple with it or talk about it or, or even like have it. You know, like, it's that kind of like paradox of like, sex is everywhere. And also, it's not really in my life. You know, like, I think she, she's really kind of selling the mental frazzledness of that. You know, and so I think she's really good in that part. And I wish, I wish there was more of her.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, me too. I think we are all recommending you go and seek this film out. It's not going to be in remultiplex, but if you can find it, go, go and see it. And it's called I Want Your Sex because what it's trying to say at the end of the day is that sex is natural. Sex is fun. Sex is best when it's one-on-one. Or in case, you know, it's up to you, you could maybe invite some folks in. That brings us to the end of our show. Mark Rivers, Aisha Harris, thank you so much for being here.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Thank you, Glenn.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  My pleasure.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  This episode was produced by Haps of Fatima, Lennon Sherburne, and Mike Katz. And edited by our showrunner Jessica Reedy and Hello Kim In provides our theme music. Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon and we'll see you all next time.