Being naked and filming sex scenes wasn’t a problem for Riley Keough, who stars in The Girlfriend Experience, STARZ’s new 13-episode series about a second-year law student who opts to become a high-end call girl. What she had a problem with was the idea of sex with no emotional connection.
“As a human, my feelings on sex have always been that it’s something that you do with somebody that you care about,” Keough, who previously starred in Mad Max: Fury Road, tells Parade.com. “I don’t feel the way about sex that people do, where they just like sex. For me, it’s something that you do with a person you care for. I know a lot of people just have sex, which is fine. I know people like that and I’ve just never really understood that before. I do to a degree but not to the degree that Christine is doing it.”
The Girlfriend Experience, inspired by Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 film of the same name, is the story of Christine Reade (Keough), a second-year student at Chicago-Burnham Law School and a new intern at the prestigious firm of Kirkland & Allen, who gets introduced to the world of the GFE by a classmate and, in an indefinable moment, decides to try it on.
“I feel really strongly about not telling people what Christine is feeling because I like leaving people open to their interpretation of it,” Keough, the 26-year-old granddaughter of Elvis Presley and daughter of Lisa Marie Presley, says. “But, I think that anything that she does, she commits to 100 percent, so she wants to be the best at it. When she starts to go in that direction, she wouldn’t half-ass anything, so I think that her curiosity goes there and, then, once she’s in, she’s in, and she wants to do the best job she can.”
A Girlfriend Experience is more than paying a prostitute for sex. It is an encounter that blurs the boundaries between a financial transaction and a romantic relationship, because it involves emotional as well as physical intimacy.
To make sure she had a grasp on the role, Keough Skyped with a woman who had been a part of the GFE world, and who while enjoying her time, had also taken a cautious approach to the profession, leaving any situation which made her feel uncomfortable.
“I asked her about the intimacy thing: How could you sleep with people you’re not physically attracted to?,” Keough says. “She said that she would focus on one specific thing she liked, whether it was their shirt, or their eyes, or whatever. Just focus on that thing the whole time they were having sex or doing whatever, which I thought was interesting, but it didn’t really work for me.”
That said, Keough also points out that what makes The Girlfriend Experience different from other shows about working girls is that it is unbiased and nonjudgmental about the sex-for-money industry.
“We don’t sway the audience to believe that it’s moral or immoral, or correct, or right or wrong. We just tell the story,” Keough says.
The Girlfriend Experience premieres Saturday, April 9 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on STARZ.
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