LOS ANGELES—When Angela White decided to make a statement about idealized body images with a dramatic porn scenario, she called Bree Mills.
The reigning AVN Female Performer of the Year and the creator of the 2018 AVN Award-winning Best New Imprint, PureTaboo, flirted with the idea of collaborating ever since White relocated to America from her native Sydney, Australia, in the summer of 2016.
Once Mills heard what White was thinking, she knew the timing was right.
“It definitely piqued my curiosity and my spidey sense that this is going to be a good story to tell because it is a story that is an elephant in the room,” Mills says. “It is not an issue that’s really ever explored within adult cinema and certainly not within a more serious, critical tone and so I thought that it was very, very interesting.”
White and her studio AGW Entertainment combined to win a record 14 AVN Awards in January on the strength of her uninhibited performing and high-end gonzo sensibilities, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t love a dramatic narrative.
“Bree’s been doing amazing things with PureTaboo,” White says. “She’s been pushing a lot of boundaries and she’s created a product unlike anything else on the market right now and a platform to really tell stories.
“It’s really about the power of storytelling. And I haven’t done that much storytelling in my work. When I produce for AGW Entertainment I’m very much focused on gonzo. That’s become the genre that I like to produce and direct and where I feel I can really explore my sexuality. But I do want to explore the power of acting and I do want to tell stories as well and Bree was the perfect person to collaborate with and create something special.”
The two set out to turn White’s story into a script that was shot in February starring Karla Lane, the 2016 AVN BBW Performer of the Year, three-time and reigning AVN Best Actor, Tommy Pistol, and White. The groundbreaking episode, which is one of the first major porn productions to ever cast a plus-size model in a leading role, is titled “The Weight of Infidelity.” It will debut at midnight EST Friday for free on PureTaboo.com, marking only the second time a full episode has ever been made available to non-members of the site.
White tells AVN she envisioned Lane and Pistol as her co-stars from the start. Pistol plays the loathsome husband John, who is always telling his wife Angie (White) that she has to lose weight for her to be more attractive. But what Angie doesn’t know is that at the same time he’s tearing her down, John is cheating on her with the more voluptuous and curvy, Karen (Karla Lane), whom he is encouraging to eat more as part of his feeder fetish.
“I’ve been a plus-size performer in the industry for 13 years and this is the first time I've performed in a feature of this magnitude,” Lane tells AVN. “Plus-sized models are not cast in roles for mainstream adult movies. I hope this scene makes other companies think outside the box and consider shooting more plus-size talent.”
Lane says her biggest challenge playing Karen “was playing somebody that wasn’t me.”
“I’m a gonzo girl and I never really played a role before,” Lane continues. “Karen was more of a introvert and subdued and if you’ve ever met me, you know I’m a giant, bubbly ball of energy.”
Lane adds, “Bree Mills, Craven Moorehead and the entire crew are amazing. It was a lot of fun working with them. Angela White wrote a script that I love. She really put a lot of energy into this movie. PureTaboo is doing something different from everyone else; their movies are gritty, raw and full of passion. I feel honored that they cast me in the role.”
The versatile Pistol, who has established himself as one of the finest actors of his generation during his glittering 14-year career, tells AVN what made this role so hard was how nasty his character had to be.
“The biggest challenge about playing this character was how intentionally abusive he was,” admits Pistol, who has won the adult industry’s top acting award in three of the past five years. “I’ve played many characters you would call crazy. But I've never played someone who would pick apart someone’s appearance or weight to hurt them. It's hard to insult someone you’re friends with in a scene.
“This wasn't something I've ever done before. Being that Angela wrote this, she knew what she wanted and I was glad I gave her the performance she wanted.”
Known primarily for his flair for comedy, some of Pistol’s memorable roles include playing a half-assed secret agent in Digital Playground’s Stryker, a clown stripper in BurningAngel’s Jessie Lee’s Girls Night Out, and Pee Wee Herman and AustinPowers/Dr. Evil in separate Vivid parodies. But the veteran of close to 950 adult movies can deliver a serious performance just as well.
“I’ve never been in a scene where my partner wanted me to point out her flaws,” Pistol continues. “It's something you would never do. Like I said, I've played crazy. But I never insulted someone specifically on weight or appearance. I found myself checking in with Angela because I felt horrible after things I’d said. I have to give her respect in going somewhere a lot of performers might not feel comfortable going. PureTaboo is producing unique content and raising the bar in adult cinema. I'm really proud to be a part of it.”
In this exclusive interview, Mills, who co-directed the 2018 AVN Award-winning Best Drama, Half His Age: A Teenage Tragedy with Craven Moorehead, joins White to discuss the making of “The Weight of Infidelity”—from concept to completion—in what without question is one of this year’s first must-watch scenes.
AVN: What was your inspiration for this story?
ANGELA WHITE: Many different things influenced me. Obviously, I wanted to use this platform to talk about the way idealized body types can be used against people as a weapon. Used against women—and men—as a display of dominance and power.
So the idea had been swirling around in my head for quite some time and in fact Bree and I had been talking about collaborating on something since I arrived. But we initially thought we were going to do something for Girlsway…and when I arrived I was so heavily booked, I didn’t even have time to think about a collaboration or story or anything. And then Bree created PureTaboo and I had this kind of dark story in my head and I was like this would be a great platform to do it.
And because Bree had talked about being open to collaboration before I contacted Bree and said, ‘I’ve got this story, are you interested?’ And she was, which was great. So I guess this is a dark scene with a powerful message and I just wanted to use this powerful platform that we have in adult entertainment to talk about the elephant in the room. Obviously, we’re in an industry where body image matters. It’s something that we use to sell a product and it can be positive or negative. And in this case I talk about the negative impacts of idealized body image.
BREE MILLS: Angela has shot with us for Fantasy Massage and Girlsway many times since coming to LA and we’ve worked together on set in bits and pieces before. But I had her come down and play a role that I had written with her in mind for PureTaboo. I think we would’ve shot it in late 2017—maybe November or December—and it was an opportunity to really work together as a director and actress for the first time and it was a really good experience and a fun experience; and certainly, I left that feeling very confident and eager to work with her again.
… I myself went through an interesting process in coming to a point where I really decided that it was something very important to do. Initially I took the idea and thought OK, this is a great opportunity to collaborate. I would much rather collaborate on this than anything else. And I had some mixed reactions when I took it back to my sales and marketing team who are looking at the data points and the sales figures; and one of the convictions that Angela was very strong about, which I really, really applauded, was that she wanted to make sure we cast a plus-size model within this story.
And that was something that was part of how she wanted to tell it. And I had a little bit of back and forth with my teams back home [in Montreal] because that was going to take us to a place that was not the core or sort of stereotypical model type or body type that our audience is looking for. And it kind of came to a point where we even went back a little bit and Angela challenged me on that where she said, ‘In all respect if it’s not going to work it’s no problem but this is something that’s very important to me to this story.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, you’re right, it is important.’ In a way what I’m all about is challenging the status quo. So yeah, let’s do this. And I very much want to give credit to Angela for really driving this to happen and also challenging me a bit to challenge the status quo.
So when we agreed to do it, it was to really do it the way it should be done with who we wanted to cast and the story that we wanted to tell and how we wanted to tell it and the result is so powerful. It’s one of the most powerful episodes we’ve ever done, so much so that I’ve decided that it isn’t just going to be a regular update for us. It’s actually something that we’re going to offer to everybody to watch for free.
There are regular updates and then there are scenes that are really important to show. And the whole motivation behind this was to make this statement and to start this conversation. And so it’s only right to empower as many people to be able to see it to facilitate that discussion.
… I think I was so moved by the opportunity to look at this as more than just being a piece of commercial content because we do have a responsibility as producers and content creators to leave people thinking and to drive the needle so I think this is a good opportunity to do that.
AW: We’ve been working on this for a while because it was November I sent that first email to [Bree] with my script idea and it was in that first email that I said that I wanted Karla and Tommy.
Obviously, Karla being a BBW, plus-size model I thought that could be an issue for PureTaboo and PureTaboo’s target audience and a similar story may have been able to be told with a slimmer model. But when we did have discussions about the casting and changing the casting I just felt that writing Karla out of the script or choosing someone else wouldn’t tell the story how it was initially supposed to be told.
And the fact that casting was even questioned shows that fat is taboo, in and of itself. Just the idea of being fat and having a story where we talk explicitly about fat and becoming fat and sexualizing fat. That’s taboo in and of itself. And PureTaboo is all about addressing taboos and breaking taboos and breaking stereotypes. I wanted Karla from the beginning and we went back and forth and Bree agreed with me and we came to the conclusion that Karla was the one.
It turned out to be an incredible scene, aside from the story itself, the actual sex scene for me I think is powerful and beautiful and sexy in a dark way as well.
It’s a little fucked up but it’s also sexy. I use the fetish of feederism as a vehicle for exploring Tommy’s character’s abuse. He force-feeds Karla, while basically underfeeding me. I wanted this piece to not be fat-shaming. I wanted to be able to talk about fat and talk about food intake without shaming anybody.
And one thing I did want to make clear is even though I use the fetish of feederism in this piece to talk about abuse, feederism in and of itself isn’t abusive. It’s a fetish that can be safe, sane and consensual. It often has a dominant and submissive power structure. But it can also be just about the joy of food in a sexual or intimate context. So I hope that comes across that the feederism in the scene is an abusive use of that fetish. It’s not the way that fetish is usually experienced in the real world.
It’s quite powerful because in the beginning you see where John is using food as a way to control my actions. He criticizes what I eat; he controls my workout schedule; he takes my food away from me; he watches my weekly weigh-ins, consistently criticizes my body. So in the beginning you get this feeling that John obviously wants a skinnier wife. He likes skinnier women. And then we completely flip that and break the stereotype that men always cheat with someone who’s slimmer and he’s cheating on me with Karla, who plays Karen. But in his relationship with Karen he’s coercing her to gain weight. So he’s force-feeding her cupcakes and even though it’s sort of consensual in the beginning you get the sense at a certain point that Karla is like, ‘No, I’ve had enough cupcakes.’ And he’s very coercive in making her continue to consume.
And I believe this to be true in society that weight has nothing to do with what John wants. It’s about power; it’s about control. And he’s controlling us in different ways and using weight and food as a weapon against us.
And both the women come to recognize this and we take our revenge.
BM: What was wonderful about the choice to bring Karla in is that Karla—within the BBW market, within the plus-size model community—she’s a very well-known performer, a very popular performer. So she’s been around and certainly has built a name for herself within that niche, but has never been in a mainstream adult product before, has never been in an acting role before.
She is a self-described gonzo girl, so it was a challenge for her to come in and play 0 to 60—a pretty serious role—and she nailed it. She has one part in the episode where she’s got a real kind of heartfelt confession and it’s the Karla Show in that sequence. It’s essentially a monologue. And I think we shot it in two or three takes but we could’ve taken the first one. She was a natural.
And that’s not even to hit the important social message here, but even just for the inclusiveness. I walked away from that experience with a renewed sense of interest in being able to—whether it’s on PureTaboo or another platform—offer these types of opportunities to different types of models that are often shunned from that just because of the way they look or the particular niche they serve. When clearly there’s such amazing talent across the spectrum.
So I really hope to that her fans and fans of BBW content are going to be able to enjoy something that’s not just marginalized or a low-quality production because there isn’t enough overall interest. I was really happy to see that, too. It makes me want to go create an amazing premium BBW series, seriously. It’s now on my radar.
AVN: Before that first take with Karla’s dramatic sequence, what was your direction for Karla? What kind of conversation did you have before you started rolling?
BM: The way that we do PureTaboo episodes, I guess the approach that I take to all of them is and this was very much the same, was we do my Porn Script Theater. We start the day with a discussion and actually what was really wonderful about was we all sat around the dining room table and had a really good conversation before we shot anything, about our motivations and respect and how we wanted to go about telling this story. So we kind of set the tone for the day that we were all doing something important and we all took that challenge and kind of carried that through. And the way that we don’t write a traditional dialogue script for PureTaboo, it’s a story that we flush out through improv workshopping essentially.
So we had done that all day and by the time we shot the—I can’t remember if the sex had happened yet—but we had been working together for hours at that point. She had already been doing a few smaller sequences. And she came into that role with a lot of knowledge. She had a lot of knowledge about feederism; she had a lot of knowledge about the subject, so she brought that out in her character and did it with tremendous earnestness and authenticity. We all kind of watched the tape and though, ‘OK, there’s that character.’ She became the character very naturally. So there really was not a lot of direction apart from setting the stage and getting us all in the mindset of the characters, which is generally what I try to do when I’m on set anyway.
AW: And I love that she took the character so seriously. She already came with her own ideas and her own experiences with the fetish and she had friends that enjoyed the feederism fetish, so she had spoken to them and asked them about their experiences and also even with her clothing choices. She was very specific. She said those kinds of fans and the feeder fans that want you to gain weight they love it when you’re clothes don’t fit properly because it shows that you’re gaining weight. And so she brought bras and pantyhose that would dig in and cut into her skin to create more rolls and to be able to say, ‘Oh, my clothes aren’t fitting right. I gained some weight and that’s part of the sexual appeal of it. So she thought about everything.
BM: What’s so nice about doing these types of projects, especially at this point, is where everybody’s kind of coming to our sets with a serious attitude and wanting to leave their mark on it. Karla’s a good example of a lot of performers who will come, who will read the story in advance and come with an idea or a twist or some aspect that they can draw from their own life to bring into their characters. So it was great to see Karla do that. It added a lot of value to the story and to the authenticity of it.
AW: And it makes it a true collaboration because everybody’s coming together and putting their ideas out there and helping to bring the story to life.
AVN: How did the process work from taking your idea for the story and collaborating with Bree to get something on paper that you brought to the set?
AW: That was difficult because I am so in the routine of shooting gonzo so I’m thinking of specific gonzo shots and the tease and creating the space for spontaneity and the sex for this I really had to think about the story and what I wanted to say. Like Bree said, we don’t write a script but we do have things we want to have said at certain points. So I wrote my initial idea down and even that was difficult to kind of think of a way for the story to have an arc and have an ending.
I had a lot of help from Bree and the final treatment Bree actually wrote for me. So I wrote an email with all the theme. I wrote the story in brief. But I’m so busy shooting I knew that writing the final treatment would’ve taken me so long and Bree has so much experience I’m sure it probably didn’t take that long to whip up.
BM: This is what I love about doing these story collaborations. I think I’ve done four or five at this point overall and what is wonderful is that the hardest part about writing a story at least for me is thinking of the story itself. I’m a very good ‘bullshit writer’ is what I like to call myself. If you give me the meat of it, I’ll do it in a morning. I write from 6 to 10 a.m. every morning, that’s my time.
So it’s a lot easier if I don’t have to think. I can just translate, which is essentially what Angela originally sent me in her outline. She sent me basically the beginning, middle, end. And she also included a bit of initial dialogue that she had written that could be something and even though we don’t write dialogue, I knew the beginning and the middle and the end and I knew the main themes and the main messages she wanted to get out because she started with what statement she wanted to make and then from the dialogue itself I got a good sense of the tone of the two principal characters—the couple. Then it was very easy for me.
I remember when we were doing pre-production and we were settling on dates and stuff. When I looked to translate the idea into the final treatment at first I thought, OK, we’re going to have to do a bunch of rounds back and forth, but it was actually really easy because she had given me all the meat. It was all there. So I put it together and the main reason why I do what I call the translation is mostly because I know what we can achieve with it in a production day so I can kind of… I write and then I always take my story and dissect it into a production schedule so that I can reality check myself. OK, how many setups is this? OK, this is 15 setups, which is not achievable. So I did that so I would know if I had to trim anything out I would know why.
And then also I have all my treatments run through my best friend—our legal team, who have a very love-hate relationship with me. But I have all of my stuff vetted to make sure when we do publish it that it isn’t going to cross any boundaries in terms of Visa and MasterCard. There’s that whole side of the business in terms of compliance and then also our own company’s ethical standards and guidelines for things we do and don’t do. So I kind of translate it and then vet it and that’s sort of the role that I played. But the story was essentially almost the exact same thing that was written in the outline. I just stretched it out a little bit and made sure we could do it in a day.
AW: So Bree did give me the opportunity to try and do that myself and I sat down and tried but I work so much and I was distracted with work and I obsess over every sentence and you can’t write like that. Like I’m obsessive with everything. So I think if I need to write a larger script in the future I need to let go of that perfectionism and just write what’s in my head and get it out there, but I think that takes practice. And this is obviously my first kind of script, if you will.
BM: it’s interesting because this is the fourth or fifth one I’ve done and I’ll say Angela’s was definitely one of the most concrete visions for something. It was a pretty easy adaptation. But just to speak to the larger idea of collaborating in general and why for me I’m finding it so rewarding to do is…you can easily write off like, ‘Oh, what is a collaboration, how involved is each party in it?’ But it’s really amazing to see what my collaborators are bringing me. And the more we go, I received two last week. They’re full scripts! From people that I’ve shot enough times that they know how we write. It’s really lovely to see, even when the ideas are all out there and it doesn’t take much to translate them into a scene treatment, which is essentially all that I did so…
AVN: What is it about Tommy that you felt he could really lift this story to where you wanted it to be?
AW: Tommy was absolutely incredible. I knew that he would be good. Obviously he’s won so many acting awards and everybody knows that Tommy’s one of the best actors in the business and I’ve seen that he’s been able to play those creepy characters for PureTaboo before. So I knew he’d do a great job but he even surpassed my expectations. I know the story affected him a lot, but I think he found the character to be quite disturbing. Because even while we were doing takes, there’s a part in the kitchen where he’s taking the spoon away from me as I’m trying to have a couple of mouthfuls of ice cream. The things he is saying to me are quite insulting, the way he’s speaking about my body and how it’s not good enough. And when there were breaks and between takes, he would apologize to me for the things that he was saying to me.
Even he knew that the things that he was saying, even though it’s in a role, that you don’t say that to women. You don’t say that to anybody, but particularly when someone’s standing in the kitchen naked and vulnerable. And he felt bad that even saying that to someone in an acting context. I assured him that whatever he wanted to say go harder. This is what I wanted for the story. I wanted to make the audience feel uncomfortable, but it even made the actor feel uncomfortable. I knew at that point that it was going to be quite a powerful story that would make people think. I’m sure that most people will not enjoy it. It’s not an enjoyable thing to watch, but it certainly has a powerful message and a powerful meaning and it shows just how manipulative John is as a character in the scene.
BM: I’ve spoken to him about this and Tommy is certainly one of the greatest actors in the history of this business, an absolute joy to work with. I would work with him every time I worked if I had the opportunity. And he said, ‘Of all the things that I’ve ever done this was one of the toughest roles for me to play because it was so uncomfortable to lose myself in somebody so manipulative. And I found it to be an extremely powerful and distributing experience to go there but as an actor I really think it’s a landmark scene and it’s certainly one of the most memorable scenes I’ve ever done.’ So coming from Tommy, whose done a huge library of different performances, I think that echoes the overall feeling I think all of us have about it.
AW: But I think it’s uncomfortable because it’s so real as well. I’m sure a lot of the characters that he’s played in PureTaboo are so unreal—incest—these things that are not something you’re doing in your real life. Not that he’s saying these things to women in real life but it’s a real experience. Most people at some point in their lives have felt like they’re not good enough.
And most people, men and women, have looked in the mirror and thought that their body doesn’t measure up to an idealized body image. So most people can relate to that and so when he’s saying those things it’s something that he can relate to as a person. I know that must’ve been difficult.
BM: It’s one of those things. It’s definitely a no-no. And he did it in a brilliant way of just being a real condescending jerk, where you hear what he’s saying and it’s just like, ‘Oh, ohhh.’ It does provoke a feeling of—because you know that’s taboo. That’s not permissible behavior. And that’s how the scene opens.
AW: Then it’s even more devastating for her to discover that he’s cheating on her with someone that’s larger than her. Because she has spent so many hours throughout her day, weeks, months, trying to lose weight, and agonizing over the fact that her body isn’t good enough only to find out that it has nothing to do with how she looks because he’s clearly attracted to women that are much larger. And you see throughout the scene just how negative his comments are and how she is. She spends her whole day obsessing about food and obsessing about exercise and trying to live up to these expectations both of John but of society.
John’s really standing in for societal pressures; he’s standing in for patriarchal values; he’s standing in for that pressure that we all feel to live up to something that we’re never going to achieve. And Angie’s lost her self worth. Even in the beginning you can see when he’s saying things that should shock her, she’s accepting it—that’s she’s not good enough. That she needs to do better and she understands that.
AVN: Given the tone of the story you were telling, what went into your decision for the production design, the lighting and the shots?
BM: We shot it with the same look, feel and cinematography style that we do for all of our PureTaboo episodes so there wasn’t too much of a contrast there. I will say this story did involve—even as real as it was in its subject matter—it did involve some fantastical elements in the sense there was some dream sequences in it and a lot of inside Angie’s head as a character. So that was a little bit of a departure from a lot of the stuff that we do, which is very straight up, one-act play in a room. Real time. So the final product has a slightly different feel from some of our other scenes because it incorporated some dreamscape elements and moments that weren’t totally rooted in reality.
But in terms of the set design, we wanted it to feel real conventional. So we used a location that provided us those looks and sets. And apart from having a lot of cupcakes involved in the production directly—I mean they should have a credit—but it wasn’t too far past how we traditionally shoot and edit our content.
AVN: So all the sex is in the same episode?
BM: I love breaking sex scenes up. I don’t know why we have to stick to having an intro and then a certain number of minutes of sex with a minimum number of positions…So what we did is we took a boy/girl/girl pairing and we deconstructed it. So there’s three sex sequences throughout the scene and three unique pairings. So you had Angela and Tommy; Tommy and Karla; and Angela and Karla.
So within the context of the single story and the situation within the story, we have three separate sex scenes.
What we’re going to do is we are going to release it on April 20th, but we’re going to do it as a free release. So it will be offered as an update for our members. But then we’re also going to offer it on the tour as a full-length scene for anybody to come in and watch. So that will be on April 20th. Happy 4/20. We will release this as a DVD that will probably come a couple months after.
AVN: What were the occasions when you did this before?
BM: The only time I have ever done that before was when we launched. In the weeks leading up to the launch of PureTaboo I put a scene on a ‘Coming Soon’ page. There was a full-length scene for people to get a taste of what was coming. That was the only other time I’ve released a free scene. Obviously, when I did that initially there was a commercial reason. I wanted to get eyeballs on what we were doing. This is a bit different. I want to get eyeballs on what we’re doing, but for me it’s not for the primary sake of making sales. It’s for what I feel is a very important scene to expose to the industry, to expose to our fellow performers, to expose to our fellow producers, to industry supporters and fans. And I think that burying it within our update schedule for our members only is not the way I want to release this. People can come and check us out and if they want to join they can join like they always can. But that’s not the reason why we’re releasing it. We’re releasing it because I think it’s something that’s the first of its kind and I hope that it’s the start of encouraging others to challenge the status quo of what adult content could be, which is very much part of PureTaboo’s message. At our heart that is what we try to do.
So this is a perfect example. Why hide it just because it cost us a little money. It’s not just about that. Long tail it’s not about that.
AW: I like that it encourages the industry to be more inclusive as well. More inclusive of different body types, ethnicities, sexualities. Everything. Obviously, we are focused on body type in this one but I think the industry can always do more to be more inclusive with the casts they choose and even crews. It’s just a way of thinking about how we should constantly be thinking about ways we can be a better industry.
BM: And I think it’s funny because word is already getting out about what we’ve done and I’ve had a couple of producers, female producers coincidentally, who’ve reached out to me, to say, ‘Thank you for doing this. I’ve tried to do this type of thing and I haven’t been able to,’ or ‘I really appreciate that you guys are exploring weight shaming or this subject and getting it out.’ So even before we’ve released it you know, within our fairly small-town community, you can see that it does resonate with people. And that to me is exactly why we wanted to do it in the first place and I think why it’s important to allow people to see it as in itself a socially critical piece. I think that is important to get out there.
AW: I guess I really encourage everyone to watch this. Even if they think it’s not going to be their thing they should just have a look and just see. Because a lot of the times even I’ve found with my sexuality exploring it through pornography there have been times when I thought I’m not going to be into something and suddenly it’s turning me on and the thing that I enjoy most. So I think it’s important for people to watch it even just for the message. But I think they’re going to find it sexy, too. I think the sex scenes are really powerful and I loved my moments with Karla. That was really on a personal note I really wanted to have sex with Karla, so it was great.
BM: And she really wanted to have sex with Angela so there was a lot of chemistry. But yeah, even fans of girl/girl content. Even from a sex perspective it has a little bit of something for everybody in there in terms of taste and dynamics and stuff. It really is an interesting piece and it is a very sexy piece, especially the connection between the two women that’s developed. Especially that over time there was a real raw sensuality and emotion to that.
And I know having spent many years talking to lesbian content fans that chemistry is the most important thing and it certainly was evident between Tommy and Karla. And it was evident between Tommy and Angela. There’s a lot of chemistry going on in the scene.
AW: But the girl/girl scene, the chemistry was really complex, which I liked. When you’re cheated on obviously it’s a devastating feeling, but there’s also this thing that not many people talk about. You’re often turned on by the fact that you’ve been cheated on. You want to suppress that feeling because of your devastation. And so during the girl/girl scene I kind of work through my emotions. It’s a fantasy sequence so I am working through my emotions and my anger at Karla even though she shouldn’t be the source of my anger because it’s Tommy’s character John that has done this to me.
But there’s this lust for her and thinking that her body is amazing because she’s beautiful and this lust and I’m turned on by the fact that she’s fucked my husband and I’m just turned on by her body. But then I’m also angry. I’m angry at the situation. I’m angry at him. I’m angry at her. I work through my anger and my lust in this dream sequence and end up coming out the other end, obviously, keeping my anger towards John. And Karen and I team up to get our revenge. So I think the sex scene talks about something we don’t talk about often.
Nobody is talking about how hot it is to be cheated on because no one wants to admit that that’s got a sexual pull to it.
BM: The scene between Karla and Angela, I was crying behind the scenes. Just because it gets really real.
And I’m known for crying on the set when it gets to that point. Ask our cast. But I was in tears by the end of it because it is so complicated and it hits a nerve where you are in that position that Angie the character’s position is in, it really does thwart you. Everybody’s been in a position where they’ve been burned by someone before. You can tap into that and it does draw out a lot of mixed feelings. Watching it play out live I was very moved by how powerful and raw it was and seeing these two actresses get to that extremely raw place, it was very powerful.
AVN: What about the cliffhanger at the end? How do you want people to respond to that?
BM: Here’s my thing: I know what I can show and I know what I can’t show. But I know what I can leave you thinking and no censor’s going to stop me from what you’re left with in your own imagination. So we like to infer things at the end of our episodes. And generally the things that we’re inferring are things that we couldn’t really show on screen, but your imagination is going to do a far better job of playing out the next part of that story by yourself. I like to leave you writing the second chapter.
AW: The thing with art is once you put it out there you have no control over how people interpret it, so people may come to their own conclusions. But I think we made it pretty clear what we wanted to say. And so much of the story—well the entire story is about consumption—restricting consumption and so the ending also has its own take on consumption and obviously it’s not really touched on in adult but food in and of itself is very, very intimate. You’re putting something inside your body that becomes part of you. I feel like food and sex are very much connected in that way. They’re similar. We use sex to connect with people and we use sex to bond and when we have sex we’re transgressing the bounds of our body and someone is going inside of you.
And just like with food we use food to connect with people. Food says a lot about us. It says a lot about our culture. It says a lot about how we grew up. It’s comforting just as sex is comforting. Obviously, the ending also is connected to consumption.
BM: And to taboo and definitely a darker side of taboo. It’s a pretty powerful message that Tommy’s character will not be manipulating women anymore.
