Veteran actress Kathryn Hahn, star of the 2017 Amazon miniseries I Love Dick, currently can be seen in a similar role as a woman experiencing a mid-life sexual awakening—but this time the catalyst for her self-discovery is not a narcissistic artist named Dick, played by Kevin Bacon. This time, what sets her off on her sexual quest is a Google search for MILF porn.
In the new HBO series Mrs. Fletcher—based on a novel by Tom Perotta, who was also behind the network’s critically acclaimed drama, The Leftovers—the 46-year-old Hahn portrays the title role, a empty-nest mom who sends her son off to college worried that he has learned everything he knows about relationships from his obsession with online porn.
But on her first night alone in the house, Hahn’s character, Eve, passes the lonely hours by typing “MILF” into the Google search box, and a whole new world suddenly opens up for her.
“She masturbates while making cookies, fantasizes in the frozen food aisle, screens amateur porn with her morning coffee,” wrote Entertainment Weekly critic Kristen Baldwin, in her review of the seven-episode, half-hour dramedy. In one epsisode, Baldwin recounts, “Eve attempts to spank herself while leaning over the chair at her kitchen island.”
And so on.
While her Eve Fletcher character has never discussed porn with her son, in real life, Hahn told Variety that she and her own 13-year-old son “are incredibly open with talking about issues like that. The incredibly good thing in this scenario is that he had really great examples and that’s a huge start. Good examples are really huge.”
With the HBO show’s heavy emphasis on sexual subject matter, the network also hired an “intimacy coordinator” to oversee the filming of the show’s numerous sex scenes, a practice HBO began with its David Simon–produced 1970s/’80s porn drama, The Deuce.
Hahn said that despite some initial hesitation, she found that the use of an intimacy coordinator gave her more freedom as an actress.
“My first thought was that I was worried that maybe it was going to be something between the director and the actor, that it was going to feel like an extra voice in a way, but it was not like that at all,” she told Variety. “In fact, it made it feel like all the stuff was just handled so we could just focus on the scene. We knew that the partner was taken care of and felt safe and you could just walk on and feel completely comfortable and safe and good.”
Mrs. Fletcher debuts on HBO this Sunday, October 27.
Photo by Angela George / Wikimedia Commons
