As his edgy screwball comedy I Want Your Sex arrives in cinemas, the LA director talks Gen Z sexual mores and his lifelong attraction to kink
Gregg Araki’s return to moviemaking has been a long time coming – and he’s grateful that he took his time. The director’s last film was in 2014: the fey and forgotten White Bird in a Blizzard. His big return – I Want Your Sex, a cheeky and satirical play on Secretary, starring Olivia Wilde as the dom and Cooper Hoffman as her sub – actually predates White Bird in a Blizzard and Araki first read a spec script in the early 2010s. “In the original script, it was a female intern and a male boss, and it almost happened in 2015 in that incarnation, but it fell apart in the way indie movies do,” Araki explains, looking characteristically puckish. “I’m glad that it did, because this movie as it is in 2026 is much more interesting than if it had been made in 2015.”
I Want Your Sex is another fantastic showcase for Cooper Hoffman, whose zealous commitment to the material would be the standout were he not starring opposite a never-better Olivia Wilde. Wilde, who made a splash earlier this summer with her own sex comedy The Invite, is a supernova of personality in I Want Your Sex, as the (literally) ball-busting contemporary artist Erika Tracy. She scoops up her young intern, Elliot (played by Hoffman), and the pair engage in a kinky, HR-unfriendly office affair. Suffice to say, there has never been a character like her before in Araki’s films, which so often feature disaffected, doped-up young people.
Tracy, by contrast, is sharp, horny and ruthless (it’s no wonder Wilde jumped at the chance to play her) and her arc is surprisingly more “sex negative” than the marketing would suggest. I tell Araki that Tracy and her actions recall Lydia Tár, Cate Blanchett’s sociopathic conductor in Todd Field’s Tár. “That’s such a high compliment, thank you. I love the character and I think that, like Lydia Tàr, she’s definitely flawed … ” he lets the thought trail off. “A lot of the things that Erika says in the movie are things that I’ve said and I definitely relate to her character when she’s talking about art and sex and one-night stands. She’s really functioning as my mouthpiece.”
Araki has been making films for almost 40 years now and a near-constant in each project has been young people searching for themselves. His characters have never aged up – is there a reason why? “Because my characters are young, they tend to be unformed and confused; that, for me, is fertile creative ground to work with. My life is figured out by this point. I know who I am; I know what I do. There’s no drama in my life – I purposefully don’t have any drama in my life, I don’t allow it. A movie about my life would be so fucking boring!” He’s already working on his next project, which, surprisingly, features “a more middle-aged protagonist” but Araki is quick to point out that “there’s still young people in the movie”.
He won’t be pressed for further details on his next film, partly because he has no idea when he’ll be able to make it. “I don’t really talk about what I’m working on because it takes so long. Maybe I’ll be shooting something this year and there’ll be a new movie soon. Maybe it’ll be another 12 years.” Preferably not, I say. “Well, tell the people who finance movies to throw me some money because it’s always about that.”
Ultimately, I Want Your Sex is Araki’s playful intervention in the debate around whether or not Gen Z are having enough sex. “This movie is not meant to be a lecture, I’m not telling people what to do,” he says. “I want to trigger a conversation and open up the topic for people to talk about, argue about and pick a side.” The film feels like Araki entering his late style, retaining his punky, cartoonish visual aesthetic but with the benefit of acquired wisdom. “I’m in my 60s now and life goes by so fast – you’re going to be older and you will regret that you never fell in love, that you never took a chance. Sex is such an important part of my life and my art. I’m not telling [younger people] what to do but I feel like they’re going to miss out. The first time you break up with someone or get cheated on is devastating, but going through it is important.”
I Want Your Sex is out in UK cinemas now.