Cooper Hoffman & Gregg Araki On ‘I Want Your Sex,’ Olivia Wilde, Shooting Its Wild Sex Scenes & Roger Ebert’s ‘Doom Generation’ Hate [Interview]

Nearly 40 years into a career built on provocation, much of it sexual or transgressive, filmmaker Gregg Araki (“The Doom Generation,” “Mysterious Skin”) hasn’t lost his appetite for making audiences squirm. “I Want Your Sex,” his first feature in 12 years, makes that clear almost immediately.

The film opens with Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), an intern at a major company, being summoned by his brash boss, Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), who tells him point-blank that she wants to fuck him. Araki had been developing the film for more than 13 years, though Karley Sciortino’s original script flipped the genders: a female intern and a male boss. By the #MeToo era, that setup carried a very different charge, prompting a substantial reworking.

READ MORE: ‘I Want Your Sex’ Review: Olivia Wilde & Cooper Hoffman Pretty Much Make Gregg Araki’s Latest Worth Watching [Sundance]

Hoffman, the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, made his screen debut opposite Alana Haim in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza” in 2021. Since then, he’s appeared in Ethan Hawke’s “Wildcat,” Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night,” and “The Long Walk,” among other projects, but Araki puts his slightly awkward, eager-to-please charm through a particularly perverse wringer here. Elliot is spanked, pegged, handcuffed, dominated, and increasingly consumed by Erika while falling hopelessly for her.

Ahead of the film’s release, Araki and Hoffman discussed shooting those scenes as soon as production began, Hoffman’s chemistry with Wilde, his introduction to Araki’s films, and whether making something this sexually uninhibited changed the way he thinks about intimacy.

READ MORE: Cooper Hoffman Doubles Down On Nixing ‘X-Men’ Cyclops Rumors, Says Chase Infiniti Recently Worked With Luca Guadagnino

Cooper, you’d never done a sex scene or nudity on camera before this. How intimidating was that?
Cooper Hoffman: Totally outside of my experience! And outside of my comfort, as most jobs are for one reason or another. But, I mean, like, it’s Gregg! Of course there’s gonna be nudity and sex and, like, all the things. It’s par for the course. The nice thing about it is that you’re very trusting of him to handle it with care, empathy, and nuance. So, I was nervous, sure. But it’s like flying on a plane. I’m nervous to fly, but I trust my pilot to get me to where I need to go, you know? I’m not gonna die.

Gregg Araki: You hope!

CH: Hopefully. [Both laugh] But I really felt an immense amount of, “Oh, I can’t not do this.” This opportunity doesn’t come around all that often, and I was really privileged to get the job.

What attracts you to roles that put you that far outside your comfort zone?
CH: Nothing feels in my wheelhouse. I could name any one of the movies I’ve done and give you a very definitive account of what my “Oh fuck” days were, where I was like, “Holy shit, I can’t believe I have to do that.” Every job has them. This was just the first one that had these specific things.

But also, it does half the job for you. I’m actually getting spanked. That’s what you’re seeing, and it’s shocking and funny. I’m actually in handcuffs. I didn’t actually get pegged, but it looks like I did! [Gregg laughs] All I have to do is react.

We had a great intimacy coordinator, Yehuda [Duenyas], who explained to me what getting pegged felt like. So, I had that! It was great. I was set up for success, and I was happy to be there and do it.

Gregg, after all the sex scenes you’ve directed, what advice did you give Cooper?
CH: Let the camera love you.

GA: More like, “Good luck!” [Slaps Cooper’s knee]

[Both laugh]

GA: My big thing is always: let the camera love you. Young actors a lot of times kind of turn away from the camera, and it’s like [makes a camera frame with his hands and gets very close to Cooper’s face].

CH: Gregg wants you to be right here.

GA: [Still up in his face] This is the money angle. We want to see the face.

CH: He’s like, “I cast you for a reason. Show me your face.”

GA: But seriously, I’ve been doing sex scenes for so long. I’m super comfortable doing them. I know what the work is, I know what it’s like. For me, as a director, it’s most important that actors feel as safe and comfortable as they possibly can in a very awkward, vulnerable position.

I always tell my actors that if they have any weird energy, vibe, or whatever, they can always pull me aside. I always have their back. I’m always looking out for them.

CH: We also had a great crew. We were all very close. I was close to all the camera operators, the DP, the boom guy. I never felt any feelings of not trusting people that were around me to take care of me.

GA: And Olivia, as well. You two had such a great bond.

CH: Totally. And I leaned on her a lot, which I think Elliot does inherently, so it wasn’t hard to do.

GA: Because the sex scenes were the beginning of the shoot.

CH: Yeah, it was the first week.

GA: Literally day one was—

CH: The three-way?

GA: Day one was spanking and—

CH: Oh, and the riding.

GA: Yeah, everything that happened on the couch.

CH: The old white leather couch.

GA: Day two was bedroom day.

How much did you rehearse all of that?
CH: There wasn’t a big rehearsal. We had like three hours with Yehuda, and we went through some trust exercises. You go through these things with intimacy coordinators about where you can touch and where you cannot. That was a big part of it, too. That’s good stuff to do so that when you’re in a scene, you know where someone’s comfortable and where they’re not.

Then, we mapped out the three-way scene. We maybe mapped out a few of the iPhone shots, but mainly it was just the three-way scene because there’s a lot of blocking in that.

GA: It’s a long scene.

GA: The other thing was just the montage stuff, which was like bop-bop-bop-bop-bop.

CH: Yeah, which was just me, Olivia, and Yehuda banging those out.

You shot the entire movie in 17 days. What was that pace like? And what did communication look like between you two during the shoot?
CH: Gregg is a real professional. We’re not, like, kicking it after set. He’s going home to sleep and get ready for the next day. [Gregg laughs] As much as I would’ve liked to snag a beer with Gregg, it was very much like, “No, we gotta keep going. We’ve got seventeen days to shoot this! We don’t have a lot of time.”

GA: On indie movies, there’s just no time for anything. It’s like bang-bang-bing-bang-bang. So much of the responsibility was on me because we had committed to this really tight schedule, and I knew how to do it, and all the pieces had to be in place.

CH: I went to the Charli [XCX] concert, and I had a blast, and I showed up for work the next day, and it was good. Charli also, by the way—credit to Charli—she did that incredible performance and then came to set the next day and shot having miserable sex with me, which was such a funny pivot for her. And for me, as well! Because I watched her do that and was like, “Oh my god, we have to have miserable sex tomorrow. This is so embarrassing for me.”

[Both laugh]

GA: Charli is a pro. She’s go, go, go, go. I don’t know how she does it.

CH: Totally. She’s so legit.

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More from this interview on the second page.