Great sexpectations.
The eight-episode Hulu miniseries “Dying For Sex” (premiering Friday, April 4) stars Michelle Williams as Molly, a woman with terminal cancer who decides to go on sexual escapades at the end of her life. Jenny Slate co-stars as her best friend, Nikki.
“When Liz first asked me to work on this, I was nervous about the gravity of the subject matter,” co-creator Kim Rosenstock exclusively told The Post, referring to her co-creator, Elizabeth Meriwether (“New Girl”).
The Long Island born writer, who also works on “Only Murders In the Building,” added, “But also, I was so excited and inspired by this idea that we might get to make a show about women in their 40s having sex, and talking about their bodies, and health and pleasure. I was like, ‘There’s so much opportunity in here to tell this story… through this very unusual lens of the story of someone dying.’”
“Dying for Sex” is based on a podcast of the same name from Nikky Boyer, which told a true story. The real Molly Kochan passed away in 2019 at age 45.
The premise of the show means there’s a lot of scenes where characters get busy.
“I wrote a movie that had sex in it in 2011, but I hadn’t done that since then,” Meriwether told The Post, referring to “No Strings Attached” starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher.
“So it was totally new for me,” the “New Girl” creator continued. “And we were very conscious – if there’s sex in the show, it’s for a reason. Like, hopefully, at the beginning of the sex scene, the characters are in one emotional place, and by the end, the characters are in a different emotional place. We kind of approached the sex as if it were a scene with dialog in it.”
She quipped, “You wouldn’t believe the amount of conversations that happened around those scenes.”
Rosenstock said that within the context of the story, Molly sees sex as an “antidote to death; a mode of healing and a means of putting herself back together on the inside.”
“Something that was really important to us was that the real Molly didn’t really have a lot of penetrative sex while she was in this part of her life,” she explained. “And so, it was like a challenge to think about how we were going to put sex onscreen in these ways that we’re not always used to seeing it – and, that don’t get necessarily as much attention or airtime.”
One example is a dynamic that Molly gets into with her neighbor, played by Rob Delaney, as they discover that they both enjoy when she degrades him. It all culminates in her kicking him in his nether region.
“I was so blown away by the bravery of the actors,” said Meriwether.
“Like, Rob and Michelle, to be able to be like, ‘We’ll just physically do that,’ but also emotionally to go there in the midst of that. And, it’s very funny, too. So, both of them had this huge challenge with that scene, and just nailed it – much like he was about to be nailed in the penis.”
The “Single Parents” creator recalled, “I remember just being outside, and thinking, ‘This is so cool. I’ve never seen this before.’ The craziest thing about that scene is that it’s so romantic.”
When asked if the actors – especially Williams and Delaney – were laughing behind the scenes or serious, Meriwether said “both.”
“I think, throughout the whole shoot. There’s so much awkward stuff about shooting sex scenes. You’re in various wardrobe pieces that are covering things,” she told the Post. “You have to laugh about it.”
But, she added, “it was always approached with a lot of seriousness and focus, and real understanding of what emotionally needed to happen.”
