Pop Culture Happy Hour - I Want Your Sex

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

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 heartIn ‘Pillion,’ submission is the missionWhat makes a good sex scene?Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour:Letterboxd / FacebookOur weekly newsletterSupport 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.See 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

Ooh, sex is back, baby. It is back. 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 sub-dom relationship with her assistant Elliot. He's a directionalist kid just out of college, and he's played by Cooper Hoffman. Elliot is having the time of his life, exploring its every fantasy, but Erica is a lot, and soon Elliot's life starts to fall apart. It's directed by Greg O'Rocky, 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 Glenn Weldon. Joining me today is my co-host, Aisha Harris. Hey, Aisha.

Hey, Ayesha. Also with us is NPR producer Mark Rivers. Hey, Mark. Thanks for having me, guys. Aisha, let's start with you. What'd you think? Ooh, sex is back, baby. It is back.

If this movie is any indication of that, and also, of course, you've already mentioned 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. And every sense. And that's what I love about it. It's, like, a very tricky type rope 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 Chartino, 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've 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 in terms of like older person with younger person. 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. Great. What about you, Mark? Yeah, you know, I'm going to say something I feel like I haven't gotten to say in quite a long time on this podcast, which is, I liked it.

Yeah, I know, right? It's very funny. It's well-acted. It comes from a real POV. I usually mentioned this tightrope that is walking. I feel like Gregoraki 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 where so many films are gray and dreary, this movie just pops with color, right? While many stories have the sex kind of sap out of them, you had 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, it's kind of this emblem of a kind of spiritual emptiness, you know, and Iraqi is here to say, no, no, no, sex can be fun. Sex can be exciting. Sex can teach 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 Sweet Wonders, who plays Hoffman's Roomm, 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 Iraqi's overall design, which is this is kind of supposed to go down pretty easily. Let's not overthink this. This is a romp. And for that, I think it works.

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 broad side of the barn kind of satiric. And that's very Greg Iraqi. I mean, Iraqi was one of the main voices in the new queer cinema of the 90s.

I think this is probably his most conventional film in a while. The last thing I saw of them, though, was the series called Now Apocalypse, which was a mess through 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. He cannot make an uninteresting movie. This is the thing. I think, though, what I'm going to remember most from this particular film is their 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 their performance isn't. I mean, we really get to see layers of Erica what's beneath that veneer of control. She really sees something in Elliott that she, yes, wants to manipulate, but you don't deny that she sees it. She sees something in Elliott 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 Sweet Wonders. That felt real to me. I was really impressed by this.

But, again, I'm coming back to the acting more than anything else. Yeah. I mean, Olivia Wilde seems to be channeling. Like, I see her as the bossy bitch attitude of Regina George and Mean Girls and marrying it with this extremely sex positive and adventurous nature of Samantha Jones and Sex in a City. Also a little femme fatale in there as well. Yeah, a little femme fatale. And that also kind of goes back to what you're 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 noirish or like a.

Yeah, kind of sunset boulevard. Exactly. But I think what the performances, 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. You know, I've seen Greg Araki's Teen Apocalypse trilogy, those movies, which came out in the 90s, totally effed 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. 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. 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 way? the world and maybe getting taken advantage of, but also, like, that's not going to necessarily derail your entire life.

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. Yes. And that felt very meta. I mean, Iraqi as you're getting at Aisha, like, this is someone who's thought a lot about sex in certain, in 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 Iraqi is thinking about like just what sex means 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, you know, like there's 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. And 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. Yeah, that is a great point. We'll have more of our thoughts about I Want Your Sex

after this very quick break. 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. Almost juvenile. Right. You don't hire

Margaret Show 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, are literal cartoons, his sex life with his girlfriend, Minerva, who has played, we should mention Charlie X, X, X, is cartoonishly bad. Yeah. Did you guys roll with that, or did that take you out? It's like watching a Spike film and not getting that double dolly shot.

Like, I know you're going to get that, like, cartoonish stuff in Iraqis 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 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 first. further end when I was like, oh, someone's doing this. Like, this is by design. This is not just some automaton at work here. Yeah. 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. He's going to force it upon you. 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 going to ride with this, you're not. And I think if you get into this within 10, 15 minutes, you've gotten past the sort of hopping around different storylines and finally selling into its groove, the cartoonish nature of things and just the sort of deadpan, the way that Minerva, the Charlie X, X, X character is just like this deadpan, totally sexless. Like, I don't really care about sex. She's the real villain of the movie. Who studies like this? She's studying for some medical debris or something. And she's just sitting

there doesn't even have an high letter. I don't know. What are you studying Charlie X-A-X? 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. 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 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 the sheen of like, he's going to be okay. Like Cooper Hoffman's character is going to be okay. And had the Olivia Wild character been played by

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. 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. We have to see the joy. We have to see the fun.

Elliot is having all. We talked about the film Pillion, Aisha. Yeah. 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 that the fun never came through. Like, we didn't understand why our main character in that movie was kept coming back because

it felt like something he was doing with such intensity and seriousness. This, you cannot ignore it. You can't ignore. You can ignore nothing about this movie. This movie will not let you ignore it. It's in your face. Yeah, 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 Louis-Wall's character has where I see. 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... That should be the log line. Yeah, it's 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 I do think we've been missing the good time. So he comes to portrays of sex and movies. To be fair to the script, we do see the Elliott character kind of have a break. He does. There are scenes where it happens.

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. This is what happens. 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.

Okay. 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. I think they're valid and 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. Yeah. You need both. both portrayals I feel.

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 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. And she kind of knows that. 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. Yeah. Yes, especially considering he's probably getting paid nothing at one point. Exactly. 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 margin? which, you know, the production design is beautiful. The Olivia Wilde's entire wardrobe for this film is just fantastic.

Oscar just for the costume. 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 this 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, he's like, I want that, I want that. Great. And great wigs, great wigs. And Iraqi's always been great at this.

I think about just the white 2K pop-a-a-ri vibe of his movies in the 90s for, like, just the fashion and that and those movies also were just so bright, so colorful and so vivid and not quite real, but like not real in the best way. I do want to give another shout out to Chase Sweet Wonders as Apple. She was also in the studio, so good at the studio. She played one of the employees of Susseroking's characters, the sort of young, fresh, like, we're 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 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 X, X's character is the opposite. And then, like, Apple's kind of in the middle where she's just like... Just figuring stuff out, yeah. 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. You can kind of see on her face, like, different emotions kind of clashing at the same time. You know, and I think in the film she works as the best sort of flesh and blood avatar of what a rocky'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 even 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'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 there was more of her. Yeah, me too. I think we are all recommending you go and seek this film out.

It's not going to be in every multiplex. 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. Thank you, Glenn. My pleasure. This episode was produced by Hopsatham, Lenin, Sherburn, and Mike Katzifin edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy.

And Hello, Kimin, provides our theme music. Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NBI. I'm Glenn Weldon and we'll see you all next time.