“It reflects a lot of conversations I’ve had with girls my age unpacking the desires of our generation and how they square with the core tenets of feminism and where we go from here. “I think Sam is reflecting porn culture back to its audience – the way women’s desires have been constituted post-porn, post-pop feminism, post-#MeToo,” she says. Hari Nef, a past Levinson collaborator who plays a Vanity Fair reporter in the show, says that while she found the first two episodes “a little shocking” (“I’m not used to seeing sex that explicit and that kinky with such an unwavering gaze on TV”) after Cannes, she was more able to “think about what Sam is doing and saying by including this”. The show’s vision of sex, for better or for worse, does chime with 2023’s “candidly kinky sexual climate”, as the Face’s Brit Dawson put it earlier this month whether you find the sexual content itself misogynistic will depend on how you view unconventional consensual sex acts, and whether you consider the show’s depiction of Jocelyn and Tedros’s toxic relationship dynamic an endorsement.ĭa’Vine Joy Randolph as Destiny in The Idol. “I wouldn’t be part of a project if misogyny was all it was about.” She says the five-parter takes “a complete turn” in its final three episodes, and that “what the viewer thinks is misogynistic is not exactly what it appears”. Sometimes, the sex scenes are plainly embarrassing to watch.Īccording to Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who plays Destiny, one of Jocelyn’s managers alongside Hank Azaria, those decrying the show as misogynist “are making an incorrect assumption”. There’s a voyeurism to the way Levinson shoots a lot of the sex scenes – including multiple masturbation scenes in which Depp’s character chokes herself – that creates an ominous, discomfiting feeling. The critics have one thing right: The Idol is certainly seamy. “The response is just what everyone expected,” she says, “and we’ve all had a good laugh about it.” Known for her Emmy-nominated turn in Hacks, Adams plays entertainingly nasty music executive Nikki in The Idol and provides much of the comic relief, including the line about “big-titted hits”. Veteran actor Jane Adams says that “everyone’s delighted there’s an intense response to the show”. Jane Adams as music executive Nikki in The Idol. When the first two episodes premiered at Cannes earlier this month, critics slammed it as a “toxic man’s fantasy” for a moment, its Rotten Tomatoes rating was hovering around an almost unheard-of 9% (it now sits at 25%). In March, Rolling Stone published an exposé featuring anonymous interviews with those working on the Lily-Rose Depp-starring HBO show, who alleged that its producers – megastar musician Abel Tesfaye, AKA the Weeknd, who also plays a lecherous nightclub owner/cult leader called Tedros, and Euphoria’s Sam Levinson – had burned through time and money to make a series “about a man who gets to abuse this woman and she loves it.”įollowing a pop star named Jocelyn (Depp) as she tries to mount a career comeback after a mental breakdown, The Idol is self-consciously pulpy and undeniably sordid: characters talk about wanting to make “giant fucking big-titted hits”, lock intimacy coordinators in closets, and say over-the-top things such as: “Will you let people enjoy sex, drugs and hot girls? Stop trying to cockblock America.” Depp spends much of the first episode topless, and the series is littered with allusions to contentious cult auteurs such as Paul Verhoeven and Gaspar Noé. M onths before it had even come out, The Idol was the year’s most controversial TV show.
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