Having reshaped the zeitgeist in her slime-green, that-bitch image (and announced she’ll be kickstarting London Fashion Week with an H&M-sponsored rave), Charli XCX is packing her Parliaments and heading to Hollywood, where she’s joining the cast of Gregg Araki’s contribution to the burgeoning May-December canon, I Want Your Sex.
Penned by Vogue columnist Karley Sciortino (and named after George Michael’s chart-topping 1987 hit), the film will center on Olivia Wilde’s Erika Tracy, a fictional artist with the cultural heft of Marina Abramović, who begins an affair with her much younger employee, Elliot (Cooper Hoffman). (If you’re wondering why you recognize Cooper’s name, he played Gary Valentine opposite Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza—and, yes, he is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son.) For a while, Elliot is thrilled to be Erika’s “gentle lover with a heart of gold,” but their romance soon veers into Adrian Lyne territory as “Erika takes him on a journey more profound than he ever could have imagined, into a world of sex, obsession, power, betrayal and murder.” Baby, you’ve been so unkind, indeed. No word yet on which sort of role Charli will be playing, but I hope she gets to wear a bodysuit as good as Kathy Jeung’s in George’s softporn ’80s music video.
It’s Faces of Death, though, that will mark Charli’s formal screen debut alongside Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, and Josie Totah. Helmed by How to Blow Up a Pipeline’s Daniel Goldhaber, the project is inspired by the wildly controversial 1978 shockumentary of the same name, which opens with an alleged pathologist, Dr. Francis B. Gross (Michael Carr), introducing a series of videos depicting gruesome deaths—some of which were staged, some of which were real. “For the first time in cinema history, the greatest fear of all mankind will be graphically exposed,” boasted the trailer. “Now, a motion picture dares to take you beyond the threshold of the living.” Inevitably, it became a viral hit, with millions of VHS copies sold across the country, making it the defining film of the decade’s “video nasty” craze. Mercifully, Goldhaber has no plans to recreate the mondo movie (whose horrifically graphic imagery saw it banned in dozens of countries, including the UK). Instead, he’s taking a meta approach, with his plot shadowing a content moderator for a YouTube-esque site who stumbles upon a group recreating scenes from the ’70s hit for their followers.
Interestingly, Charli personally reached out to Goldhaber about a role in the movie, and he isn’t the only writer-director she’s approached about a collaboration in recent months. Earlier this (Brat) summer, she also decamped to Poland to shoot yet another film she’s apparently co-written with Slave Play’s Jeremy O Harris. Good thing she already has enough movie-star sunglasses to see her through at least a dozen paparazzi-filled press tours.