Sophia Bush and Malin Akerman are getting candid about everything from the evolution of queer representation on the screen to pegging in a recent incredible episode of Work in Progress.
With the success of The Hunting Wives, Akerman has continued to do the press rounds and talk about the show and how it features so much queer representation without being, as she says, "in your face" about it.
"It's not like coming out and going, this is The L Word," Akerman said. "It's popcorn, it's fun, it's entertainment, but it's also just real inherent human curiosity and people being fluid."
The series is presented just as a juicy, soapy story about women behaving badly in Texas. Queerness just happens to be a part of that story. And that may be why Akerman doesn't want to claim to represent the LGBTQ+ community or anything quite so lofty, but she's still glad people are seeing themselves in it more naturally.
"I've said it before, I think most people are quite fluid, and society...put certain boundaries on what a marriage looks like, or what a relationship looks like, or what humans should look like, and what your sexuality should and shouldn't look like," she continued.
Bush went on to suggest that The Hunting Wives declining to making the queer parts of the show the selling point is ultimately "reminding people...there's gay people everywhere."
"Who the fuck cares? Who somebody falls in love with, what they do in the bedroom, who cares?" Akerman asked. "There are so many bigger problems than who somebody loves. It blows my mind. Love is love is love, and thank god there's love."
Brittany Snow as Sophie O'Neil and Malin Akerman as Margo Banks on The Hunting Wives.Netflix The conversation eventually turned to the 2006 teen romcom Bush did with The Hunting Wives star Brittany Snow, John Tucker Must Die, which featured an iconic kiss between the two of them. While admitting that cinematic moment was "a lot of people's gay awakenings," she also used it as a benchmark for how much things have changed in the past 19 years.
"Even that was so through the male gaze," Bush said. "My character teaching her character how to kiss and then, you know, the camera turning and realizing a guy was watching."
"It wasn't about that it was weird for us to kiss each other. It was like, it didn't feel great to be on camera for a guy's entertainment in that way," she continued. "And to see you guys just being together, I'm like, we really made some progress!"
The way The Hunting Wives portrays queer intimacy obviously differs from a kiss intended for the male gaze in the 2000s for multiple reasons, but Akerman's follow-up remarks highlighted the importance of diversity behind the camera as well.
"Every director was a woman, and the woman who directed mine and Brittany's first intimate scene is Melanie Mayron, and she is herself a lesbian," she recalled. "And so she's like, 'I want this to be beautiful and what we think is sexy and what we deem as sexy, and also have that nuance of the tenderness and the love and the excitement behind it.' So that was really beautiful to just have that discussion."
As Akerman notes, there's nothing innately wrong with having some things for the male gaze. But, as she put it, "this is our turn." And if that wasn't already clear enough from the scenes between the ladies, the — spoiler alert — pegging scene between Jaime Ray Newman's character, Callie, and her husband may have also been a pretty strong clue.
Amusingly enough, it also may have played a major role in Akerman's decision to sign on to the series in the first place.
"I’ve had many discussions with friends of mine who are straight men, gay men, women — all across the board — where pegging has come up quite a bit over the past few years, people just being honest," she said. "And so when this came up I was like oh my god this is amazing, I’ve never seen this on television before and I bet you so many people will relate to this, want to try this, get curious about it.
"And so that was sort of the nail in the coffin for me — that scene where I knew I was doing the scene but I was like this is so brave."
You can listen to the full episode of Work in Progress out now.
