Netflix’s Sex/Life is the sexiest show on television
As the world reacts to Adam Demos’ steamy sex scenes and full frontal nudity in Netflix romp-fest Sex/Life, spare a thought for the Aussie actor’s mum.
Billie, played by Sarah Shahi in Netflix’s addictive new series Sex/Life, has it all. There is the big house in Connecticut, perfectly appointed with beige linens and plantation shutters. She has the wardrobe full of breezy nightgowns in which to plod around her pristine, story book mansion. She has the hot venture capitalist husband Cooper (Mike Vogel) and two alarmingly well-behaved children, Hudson and Ellary. (The names? This show is set in Connecticut, remember.)
What could possibly be missing from Billie’s immaculate life? If you ask Stacy Rukeyser, the creator of Netflix’s binge-worthy Sex/Life, the clue is in the title. Billie has the perfect life, but she doesn’t have the perfect sex life.
This Netflix television show is a portrait of the mother as a young woman, a series that veers between flashbacks and the present day to show the disparity between Billie’s past and her reality.
In her twenties, Billie was a sexually liberated PhD candidate who spent her nights clubbing her way through lower Manhattan with her best friend Sasha (Margaret Odette) and her on-again-off-again, extremely-bad-boy-boyfriend Brad, played by Australian actor Adam Demos, known for UnReal.
Now, though, she’s a stay-at-home mum in the suburbs, struggling to reconcile the lack of desire she feels for her husband with the fulfilment that she receives from the stability of their life. “I think Aussie audiences will love it,” Demos says. “Everyone has had the experience of should I be this person? Do I have to change when I get to this age? I feel like everyone can relate.”
Sex/Life asks: Is there life without sex? And also, crucially, what is sex without life? This is the central theme of the series, a tangled knot of a dilemma that takes all eight episodes to unravel.
And it unravels it through a phenomenal amount of sex scenes, remarkable both for the quantity and the quality.
Shahi admits that though she never had any concerns about the amount of sexual content in the series, she was “definitely intimidated”. “When I read the first episode, I was scared by the emotional vulnerabilities that I would have to show – and I was turned on at the same time by some of the sex scenes I was reading,” she laughs.
Shahi felt instantly connected to Billie as a character. The actor, who has starred on Alias and Chicago Fire since her breakout role as Carmen in the cult hit The L Word, has three children with her former husband, actor Steve Howey, who she married at the age of 29. (The couple separated in 2020.) “I myself am a mother of three, I have been in long-term relationships in the past, and much like Billie there was a side of me I felt like I had tucked away and was ignoring,” Shahi reflects. “You can be a great mom, but still have all these wants and desires as a woman. In the show, there’s actually a scene where I look into the mirror as I’m breastfeeding, and I go, well, where did that other girl go? These were things that I myself had actually felt.”
Shahi has described the script as being juicy and addictive, and she’s not wrong. There are several sex scenes in the first episode alone and the whole thing opens with Demos’s Brad initiating a sex act on Billie in a public place. Later in the episode, the pair strip off and dive into a rooftop pool, a scene that Shahi says is “so emotional, and so beautiful – I’m incredibly proud of that”.
But she’s also equally as proud of some of the more realistic sex scenes, including all the awkward and frustrating ones between Billie and her husband Cooper. And, Demos stresses, though the sexual content of the series is plentiful, it also serves a purpose. “The writing, in my opinion, is so good that there’s no sex scene that’s in there that isn’t necessary to tell the story,” he says. “They drive the emotions of all the characters.”
Netflix has always been a horny petri dish; free from the constraints of the broadcasting watershed, the streaming platform has liberally peppered its offering with more adult content than some of its peers. This veers from the softcore Polish film 365 Days, which overcame abysmal reviews to become the most watched international movie on Netflix in 2020. (One ardent fan, speaking to The New York Times, estimated that she had seen the film more than 100 times.)
There’s the soapy Bridgerton, Netflix’s most popular original series of all time, which blended melodramatic bedroom montages with traditional costume drama fodder. And then there’s Sex Education, which views sex scenes as teachable moments, rather than mere titillation – regardless, the series features plenty of intimate scenes. What Bridgerton, Sex Education and now Sex/Life have in common is that they all drew on the expertise of an intimacy co-ordinator. Sex Education’s intimacy co-ordinator Ita O’Brien has since gone on to become an industry titan, choreographing all of the sexual content in Normal People and I May Destroy You. Creator Michaela Coel even thanked O’Brien in her recent BAFTA acceptance speech. “Thank you for your existence in our industry, for making the space safe,” Coel said.
Intimacy co-ordinators rose to prominence in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, when film and television producers scrambled to ensure that their sets were a safe environment for cast and crew. Netflix, who hired O’Brien for season one of Sex Education in 2018, was a pioneer in the field, and has since called on intimacy co-ordinators including Elizabeth Talbot for Bridgerton and Casey Hudecki for Sex/Life.
The role involves choreographing all of a film or television series’ sexual content, communicating with actors and directors to ensure that these moments are executed in a way that protects stars.
These days, most television series employ an intimacy co-ordinator. Of the shows nominated at the 2020 Emmys, 23 listed one in their credits.
Shahi had never worked with an intimacy co-ordinator before Sex/Life, and neither had Demos. “It’s confusing that they have never been around the whole time,” he reflects.
On Sex/Life, the process of working with Hudecki involved multiple discussions and rehearsals to ensure that Shahi, Demos and Vogel always felt safe and respected during each nude scene.
“We were really able to discuss, OK, I’m comfortable with you grazing the left side of my boob, but I don’t want you to touch my whole boob. Or hey, my right ass cheek is a little bit firmer than my left, so can we angle that side towards camera?” Shahi recalls. “We were able to have these very frank conversations that really helped us feel more comfortable.”
Great care was also taken by the all-female directing team to ensure that the sex scenes were both realistic and raunchy. “Usually, when you have a sex scene with a man and a woman, it’s always depicted through the male POV,” Shahi explains. “Here, it’s the other way around and it’s told through the female POV, and it’s all the different ways in which women can be stimulated. Not just the missionary position – there’s oral, there’s touching. I felt like that was quite revolutionary in terms of what it was saying about sexual empowerment.”
This emphasis on prioritising the female gaze extends to the nudity on screen; the most revealing scene belongs to Demos, who bares all in a moment of full-frontal male nudity. It’s a shocking scene, chiefly because male nudity is still so rare in popular culture. According to a 2018 study of more than 1100 films, only 9.6 per cent of male roles required nudity, compared to a full quarter of comparable female roles.
Demos is from Wollongong, where his mum and his “best mates” are still based. He was last home earlier in the year after spending most of 2020 in a locked-down Toronto, waiting for production on Sex/Life – “the best acting job ever,” he enthuses – to recommence.
“It was so weird,” Demos recalls. “I didn’t know anyone. And I was the only one who stayed, because everyone else was either Canadian or American, so everyone went home. There’d be times I’d walk around the city and nobody would be there. It was abandoned. A ghost town. But at the end of the day, as long as my mum was safe in Australia, I was OK.”
Demos’s mum is eager to see the series, although he’s issued her with a warning. “I mean, my mum is so excited, but she’s just the most biased person on planet Earth,” Demos shares. “But she is also well aware that she is going to have to close her eyes so much. Like, you’ve seen (it), how’s my mum going to watch most of that? Oh my god, I feel for her.”
Demos has also resigned himself to the fact that he’s about to become the subject of much playful ribbing in the group chats of the Illawarra region.
“My mates in the Gong – they have material on me forever now,” Demos says, laughing. But, he adds, “they’ll rip into me, but they’re also the proudest mates that you could ever have, and they’re still my best mates ever, back home in Wollongong. I probably deserve the hard time they give me.”
Sex/Life streams on Netflix from June 25.