Ryan O’Connell has opened up about the importance of sex in his new Netflix show.
Special is a brand new eight-part comedy based on series creator and star Ryan’s part-memoir, part-manifesto I’m Special: And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves, and it looks hilarious.
The Jim Parsons-produced series, which premieres on the streaming service on 12 April, follows a gay man living with mild cerebral palsy who decides to rewrite his identity as an accident victim and finally go after the life he wants.
Fortunately, the series won’t be shying away from sex and relationships, as Ryan recently stressed to Vulture how important it is for him to provide accurate representation of gay sex in mainstream media.
“I had a very clear image of what I wanted that sex scene to look like, and my director Anna Dokoza and I were always on the same page,” he explained of a scene that involves his character losing his virginity to a sex worker.
“I am so frustrated by the lack of representation of gay sex in TV and film, like in Call Me by Your Name when they panned away to the moon. I was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? This movie has more straight sex and more fruit sex than actual gay sex’.
“You’re blue-balling us the entire film, and then they fuck and you turn away? Go fuck yourself. Like, seriously. That enraged me.
“I want to bring gay sex to the forefront in a very accurate, human way. And so I knew with this sex scene, there wasn’t gonna be no panning away to the fuckin’ moon! We were gonna see how gay sex is done. I wanted it to feel real.”
He recalled that the scene in question was “probably the hardest” part for him to film, but that it ended up being one of his “favourite days on set” thanks to Brian Jordan Alvarez, who was acting opposite him.
Ryan also teased that, if the show is popular enough to get a second season ordered, there’ll be more sex scenes to come.
“In season two, ideally, I wanna show a lot more gay sex. It will all have to serve the story, but I wanna normalise gay sex, and I wanna show different flavours of gay sex other than Queer As Folk porny whatever,” he continued.
“I think it’s what fucks gay men up. We’ve been so hypersexualised, and it’s just assumed that we fuck like rabbits. It’s also a really intense, emotional thing for us too.”
Special will be available to stream on Netflix from 12 April.
Latest
