‘I didn’t want to kink shame’: How Olivia Wilde’s erotic thriller flipped the script

With its provocative title, hot-pink marketing and Olivia Wilde comanding the screen as a dominatrix, I Want Your Sex has been hard to ignore since its Sundance Film Festival premiere in January.

From director Gregg Araki, an icon of cult filmmaking and the New Queer Cinema movement, the erotic thriller is an exploration of BDSM culture and kink that goes hell for leather.

It’s an unapologetically explicit movie, salacious but fun, without ever dipping into feeling exploitative, and give gleefully embraces sexuality in a way few mainstream films dare do.

There are shades of last year’s Pillion, starring Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling, albeit with a more kitsch, rero asthetic – and a farcical murder investigation thrown into the mix.

I Want Your Sex has actually been around much longer than it seems. However, it proved a years-long battle to get such a subversive, openly sexual movie made.

Araki describes the 13 years since he first read a speculative treatment of the script by writer Karley Sciortino around 2013 as ‘a long haul’.

‘It was pitched to me as a kind of comic Fifty Shades of Grey, so that’s how long ago this was,’ he shares, a popular cultural sexual reference that seems oddly dated now.

The initial script also featured a female sub and a male dom, based on a real-life relationship that Sciortino had with an older editor of hers when she was in her mid-twenties, and which she has described as ‘a really core sexual coming-of-age moment for me’.

But after Araki came on board and they started to pursue getting the film made, the #MeToo movement gained pace in Hollywood in 2017 and the pair decided to rewrite the script, gender swapping the two main characters so it became on older dominant woman and the assistant was now a submissive younger man, Elliot, eventually played by Cooper Hoffman, the 23-year-old son of the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman.

‘I didn’t really want to have a woman getting dragged around by the hair, even in a consensual situation. I don’t want to kink shame anybody, but it made me uncomfortable to have that image,’ adds Araki.

Thus, provocative visual artist Erika Tracy was born, and the film was then tweaked to add its film noir-ish subplot of a body found in the pool.

But they were still some while away from getting the film financed, often a struggle for indie movies, but particularly when they’re ‘controversial, risqué and kind of crazy’, Araki admits.

However, finally in 2025, after working on I Want Your Sex for what seemed like forever ‘without much success’, things suddenly developed very quickly – all thanks to Araki’s manager and the undeniable pull of star-power, offered by Olivia Wilde.

‘My manager slipped it to Olivia’s agent without telling me, and then she’s like, “Oh, Olivia Wilde read it and really wants to meet.” I was like, “Olivia Wilde! That’s a f**king great idea,” because we never even got to the point where we were making a list of like 10 actresses [for the part]! There was no list, nothing.’

The pair quickly met, with Araki immediately thinking she was ‘fantastic and so fearless’ – exactly what he and Erika needed.

Since then, Wilde has become something of a sex-positive beacon after her recent press tour for her much-admired foursome film The Invite – just like Gillian Anderson with her new sexy lesbian slasher, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

I didn’t want to have a woman getting dragged around by the hair

And with I Want Your Sex, she joins force with Araki in a quest to make sex more mainstream in movies.

‘I told her that whoever does this movie, they just have to not give a s**t about what people are going to say,’ he recalls. ‘She’s like, “That’s told me, I’m totally there.”’ 

From there it was full-speed ahead to an almost comical degree, considering the long years of hard slog previously.

‘It was a Friday afternoon that I had the meeting with Olivia, and I said we’re going to try to raise the money. She got attached, and then by Monday or Tuesday the movie was financed,’ Araki reveals. That quickly.

‘It was like, get Olivia Wilde to be in your movie and it’s easy!’ he laughs.

But Wilde is also joined by a buzzy cast, including Hoffman, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Charli XCX, Hamilton star Daveed Diggs, Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho.

Gooding, son of Oscar nominated actor Cuba Gooding Jr. and a horror star thanks to his role as Chad Meeks-Martin in three Scream films and co-leading 2025’s rom-com slasher Heart Eyes, plays Zap, Elliot’s trendy co-worker who moves in all the right circles.

Friday afternoon I met with Olivia [and] by Monday or Tuesday the movie was financed

‘I had been such a fan of Gregg’s work up until then, I think I hadn’t allowed myself to believe that that would be part of the process until I was sitting in the room with him,’ the 29-year-old says.

A lot of his initial thoughts about Zap’s wardrobe made it into the final film, after he used Kid Cudi’s viral dress moment on SNL as audition inspiration. I’s not just Wilde having fun in buckles and black latex when Gooding gets to wear kilts and a pink sequinned cowboy shirt.

‘I’m super picky about the casting. I’m one of those directors that’s ‘directing is 99% casting’,’ says Araki, ‘so it takes me a long time to find the right people. But then, once I do, it’s just like do your thing and I’ve got to film it!’

Gooding had already worked with Wilde, after she directed him in her breakout movie as a filmmaker, 2019’s Booksmart, but calls working with her as an actor ‘a masterclass of nuance’.

‘I feel like I’m still learning stuff from her day to day, even after the fact, when I watched the movie,’ he shares, before moving onto Hoffman, who made his acting debut as the lead in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 coming-of-age film Licorice Pizza.

Whoever did this movie, they had to not give a s**t about what people are going to say

‘I learnt a lot from Cooper about leading a production, and how cohesive he was with every aspect of set life, whether it was a production assistant or to a production designer.’

In fact, Gooding is full of praise for everyone on the film, including Charli XCX, who plays Hoffman’s unsmiling grad student girlfriend Minerva and is ‘surely an icon’ in his book.

But he also wants to talk about one of I Want Your Sex’s standout scenes, teased in the trailer, to which he had a really ‘visceral reaction’.

So in thrall to Erika’s every whim is Hoffman’s Elliot that he drags along his best friend and roommate Apple (Wonders) to a threesome with Erika when she demands it ‘happen quick’. It’s a hilarious, uncomfortable and perhaps unexpectedly vulnerable sequence.

‘I remember laughing at the threesome scene because of how ridiculous the circumstances have been, and – not to spoil anything – but [Wonders] is wearing something that is very silly and she has a really sad emotional moment in realising how she’s being perceived,’ explains Gooding.

‘Then I saw it with an audience, and I started to get defensive about Chase and her character, about how people would have the audacity to laugh at what is a very comical sequence! But she moved me in a way that I think fits into very few cinematic experiences I’ve been lucky to have.’ 

And the same could be said for all of I Want Your Sex.

I Want Your Sex is in UK cinemas from today.

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