Olivia Wilde’s ‘I Want Your Sex’ Character Explained by Gregg Araki

In Gregg Araki‘s “I Want Your Sex,” Olivia Wilde plays Erika Tracy, an artist whose work is erotically charged and outrageous — often so outrageous that it’s hard to tell if Araki is celebrating her or satirizing her. As Erika enters into a complicated and hilarious sexual relationship with her younger assistant Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), her motives and actions become even more provocative. Is she a predator abusing her power? A mentor giving her protégé some desperately needed experience and instruction? Both? Neither?

One of the pleasures of “I Want Your Sex” is the way it inspires thought and debate regarding both the sexual relationship and Erika’s stances on art — as a provocateur, is she getting at anything genuinely profound, or is she just a poseur? Wilde’s performance is extremely specific (every gesture and expression is timed for maximum comic effect), yet she acts as a kind of Rorschach test for the audience; how one feels about Erika Tracy and her relationship with her assistant is as influenced by one’s own age, background, and sexual history as by anything in the film‘s text.

That’s exactly the way Araki wants it. “ I’m not interested in lecturing anybody, but I really want to open that conversation,” Araki told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “ The movie is a wild and crazy ride — it’s meant to be entertaining and fun and pop. But at the same time, it does have a lot of things on its mind, a lot of sort of conversation starters. And that’s what I hope, that people will have a good time and be entertained, but also leave the theater and start to talk about it, argue about it, get into fights about it.”

While audiences might feel ambivalent toward Erika Tracy, for Araki she’s a mouthpiece for many of the things he wanted to express after being shocked to read articles about Gen Z not having sex. “Sex has been a really integral part of my journey as a person, and as an artist and filmmaker,” Araki said. “It’s really what formed me. So when Erika and Elliot are sitting on the couch talking about this, it’s literally what I would say – ‘You guys are all about FOMO, and you don’t care about missing out on the sexual prime of your lives?’”

Although Araki admits that Erika is “a little nuts” and a narcissist, he says she’s definitely his stand-in among the “I Want Your Sex” ensemble. “ A lot of the things that Erika Tracy says in the first interview when Elliott is watching her on the laptop, they’re literally quotations of things that I’ve said in interviews,” Araki said. “My work has always been controversial and provocative and all the things that Erika is.  She’s very near and dear to my heart.”

Araki’s initial conception of the character was “Madonna meets Robert Mapplethorpe,” and Wilde’s performance skillfully threads that needle — and, in its audacity, makes it instantly clear why Elliot would allow himself to be sucked into her vortex. “She’s so passionate, and she’s so confident, and I think that’s what attracts the Elliot character to her, her larger-than-life presence,” Araki said.

In Araki’s original conception of the script, the artist character was a man, and the assistant was a young woman, but after #MeToo, “ I didn’t really want to see a woman getting dragged around by the hair, even in a consensual relationship,” Araki said. “Not to kink shame anybody or anything, but it’s just an image I did not want to propagate and put out there.” Reversing the roles not only helped differentiate “I Want Your Sex” from similarly themed movies like “Secretary,” it made the movie more fun to write. “It’s so much more interesting to me to have a woman Dom versus a male Dom and a female sub.”

Araki knew that the movie would live or die on the casting, and he also knew that whoever played Erika would have to be fearless. Although Wilde professed to love the script, Araki wanted to be clear on what the role required. “I remember in our first meeting telling her, whoever plays this role, they just can’t give a fuck about it,” Araki said. “They can’t be worried, oh, this character does questionable things and sleeps with her employees. Olivia just totally got it and jumped in the pool and was ready to go for it. That was really exciting to see, and she knocked it out of the park.”

“I Want Your Sex” opens in theaters on July 31 from Magnolia Pictures.

The Gregg Araki episode of Filmmaker Toolkit will air later this summer. To hear the entire conversation and make sure you don’t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.