Leslye Headland: Meet the New Queen of Raunch Comedy
I mean, you seem like the kind of guy who looked at books on vaginas and kind of figured out how everything worked pretty early on, so I’m sure you didn’t have to worry.”
For most folks, telling someone that they appear to know their way around the female anatomy would fall somewhere between flirting and highly questionable flattery. For writer-director Leslye Headland, this is small talk, casual conversation, easy-breezy coffee-klatch chit-chat. If anything, the woman behind the deconstructed romantic comedy Sleeping With Other People is more than comfortable waxing poetic about stuff people usually shy away from when being interviewed — like, say, how hopeless most guys are when it comes to navigating the Southern hemisphere.
“They have no idea what’s going down there,” Headland says, wide-eyed and smiling. “Just, zero clue. I have a chart of the vagina in my house, and when a male friend saw it, he said, ‘Wow…this just looks like something I’m going to fail at!’ I don’t get the mystery. It’s not a boogeyman.”
Thankfully, the 34-year-old filmmaker has included a PSA of sorts in her new movie about two friends (played by Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie) who bond over their inability to make the boy-meets-girl thing work. He’s a commitment-phobic Casanova; she can’t stop cheating on boyfriends with a so-bad-for-her old flame (Adam Scott, channeling his inner douchebag). Having taken each other’s virginity in college, the dynamic duo meet up in 13 years later at a Sex-Addicts meeting and form a Platonic relationship while hooking up and breaking up with others. All of which leads up to an unforgettable sequence in which Sudeikis demonstrates in explicit detail for Brie how to find the G-spot — using his fingers, techniques such as the “Dirty DJ” and a green-tea bottle.
“It was important to me that it was a guy doing it, and not just a woman going ‘Here’s how it works,'” she admits. “If I could do that and have it be sexy and funny and not straight-up fucking gross…then I know I’ve made it.”
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