As much as conservatives fulminate over relentless nudity and sex on television as a crisis of pornographic consumption, the entertainment media have keyed into the ramifications of sexploitation in production.
Over at the Rolling Stone, Cheyenne Roundtree has a damning expose of how Euphoria creator Sam Levinson and Abel Tesfaye, the Grammy-winning artist known as The Weeknd, have burned through $75 million producing a televised "rape fantasy" while borderline abusing their staff.
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Originally conceived as a story about an aspiring pop star, played by Johnny Depp's daughter Lily-Rose Depp, The Idol was ordered to series by HBO in November 2021. However, its initial director Amy Seimetz abruptly left the show this April after Tesfaye reportedly opposed her "feminist lens" showing too much "female perspective." Rolling Stone reports that when Levinson took over the show, which was 80% done and had already cost between $54 million to $75 million, he scrapped it and started from scratch "by dialing up the disturbing sexual content and nudity to match — and even surpass — that of his most successful show, Euphoria."
"Four sources say that Levinson ultimately scrapped Seimetz’s approach to the story, making it less about a troubled starlet falling victim to a predatory industry figure and fighting to reclaim her own agency, and more of a degrading love story with a hollow message that some crew members describe as being offensive," Roundtree writes.
On top of the content of the story, which was plagued with reshoots and rewrites, the crew members who spoke to Rolling Stone claimed they were overworked and mistreated.
"I would never work for him ever again. I don’t think I’ll watch Euphoria again after working for him and knowing how he treats his crew," one source said.
Dig into the story, and other obvious progressive faux pas emerge. The show succeeded in casting K-pop superstar Jennie of the girl group Blackpink, only to relegate the singer to "three or four lines per episode," according to a production source spoken to by Rolling Stone.
"They didn’t let her talk that much. Her job was to sit there [and] look pretty, basically," a source told the magazine. In other words, they tokenized an Asian woman for her fame, presumably her race, and definitely her sex appeal.
But ultimately, The Idol's catastrophe is not an aberration, but a logical and terrible consequence of an entertainment industry that has refused to oppose sexploitation — not on conservative or prudish grounds, but rather as an inherent workers' rights abuse.
While Depp, a second-generation Chanel model and the goddaughter of Marilyn Manson, may not mind the premise of stripping and simulating sex, other actresses may lack either the power to reject stripping on screen or the preference to do so.
Consider that in Euphoria, Zendaya (the Emmy-winning A-lister) and Maude Apatow (the daughter of iconic filmmaker Judd Apatow) have clearly pulled enough rank to secure ironclad no-nudity contracts. Instead, the one made to strip most gratuitously is Sydney Sweeney, who has been open about being unable to afford to turn down acting jobs or modeling gigs. (Sweeney, whose parents were not wealthy or connected prior to her beginning her career, reportedly made $350,000 for the second season of Euphoria, a killing for the average American, but not necessarily an actress who has to give a cut to her agents, her managers, and assistants.)
And Depp may say that Levinson is "the best director" she has ever worked with, but actresses often change their tune after the paychecks clear and the finale airs. Emilia Clarke, a fellow HBO starlet, confessed that she would cry while filming nude sex scenes on Game of Thrones, as she didn't even realize the show would require her to do them when she took the role.
"What about actresses who are fine with nude scenes?" Levinson defenders may ask. Well, certainly, there are women in the workplace who are fine with exchanging sex for a promotion, but anyone with a sense of workers' rights would admit that allowing sex to be used as career currency creates an incredibly perverse incentive for perversion. While simulating sex may be crucial to a storyline, should every actress who takes a job be expected to consider as fair game pointless, gratuitous, context-free nudity?
As it stands, established actors are able to push back and win. When Minka Kelly guest-starred on Euphoria, she succeeded in getting Levinson to edit a scene where she was supposed to strip in front of an underage character. Penn Badgley recently made headlines when he said he asked not to film graphic sex scenes in his Netflix series, You.
But as long as less established actresses (and actors, for that matter) are expected to shoot softcore pornography to get ahead, and crew members are expected to tolerate the chaos required to turn the pornographic fantasies of their bosses into reality, sexploitation will remain a workers' rights issue.