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After more than a decade away from film, Gregg Araki is back with I Want Your Sex, following a fresh-faced 23-year-old (Cooper Hoffman) who lands a job working for renowned artist and provocateur Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde). Things quickly take a turn, though, as Erika chooses him to become her sexual muse.
The erotic comedy plays into a recent trend of projects depicting older women in relationships with younger men, including 2024’s Babygirl and a side plot in Marty Supreme. Co-writer Karley Sciortino recently wrote an op-ed about Hollywood’s love of the new age gap, and at the movie’s L.A. premiere on Tuesday, Araki explained, “In the patriarchy, that’s normal, for the pretty young thing to be with the old rich guy. As women gain more power and more income and wealth, I think that it’s great that the tables get evened out a little bit.”
Wilde — who has her own personal experience with age gap romances and the backlash that can surround them, from her time dating Harry Styles — celebrated “the fact that audiences are really open to a trend that for so long was dominated by the traditional older man, younger woman narrative. I think it’s exciting that people are breaking out of their boxes in different ways. I loved Babygirl; I think it’s exciting that people are open to different kinds of sexy love stories.”
Araki explained how he chose his central pairing, having long wanted to work with Wilde but admitting he wasn’t sure about Hoffman at first because after seeing him in Licorice Pizza, “he was so young and I was like it’s a little creepy for her to be sleeping with this kid.” After meeting him, though, Araki was impressed by how Hoffman “has a lot of gravitas for somebody so young;” Hoffman explained in signing on, “I would be really shocked if people said no to this opportunity. It’s Gregg, it’s Olivia, it’s a wild sex movie — that feels so exciting to me, rather than something that’s boring and dull.”
Wilde’s character in particular is very far from dull, with the star saying, “Madonna was a major source of inspiration, specifically the Truth or Dare documentary” and how she was “singular in her determination to stay true to herself and completely not giving a single fuck about if people didn’t approve of her.”
The performance is also a big departure from her buzzy performance in The Invite, her other relationship comedy that came out this summer. “It’s wild because these two characters are the two kind of sides of my personality. I love that they’re so different but they’re really in the same conversation about intimacy and growing up,” Wilde said. “The Invite is about growing up into a different stage of life, I think; this one is really about adolescence and the idea of maturing into an adult and what it means to experiment and the importance of experimenting.”
I Want Your Sex, which also stars Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Johnny Knoxville, Margaret Cho and Daveed Diggs, hits theaters on Friday.
English (US) ·