In the Hulu docuseries Planet Sex, cameras follow model/LGBTQ icon Cara Delevingne as she goes on a enlightening and sometimes humorous journey exploring human sexuality around the world. And occasionally, she learns a thing or two about her own.
Here, directors Jessica Chermayeff and Ana Veselic talk about the goal of the show (streaming now on Hulu), some of the places they visited and, ahem, body parts they studied, and what they hope to tackle if Planet Sex returns for a second season.
DEADLINE What was that first meeting like with Cara?
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JESSICA CHERMAYEFF I remember it very vividly. Of course it was in the Covid era, so our first meeting was over Zoom. She had just wrapped Carnival Row. She was incredibly excited about this project and was teaming with so many ideas. It was our job to try and capture them and figure out how to put them into action. We were just really surprised, honestly, about how personal this project was to her. You always dream for a celebrity host to have a personal investment in the subject matter. It’s not always the case, but we were amazed to find out from the first conversation and then over the entire course of the project that this is not just something she was curious about or interested in. This is an actual, personal quest and journey for her.
DEADLINE Did she come in with a specific goal?
CHERMAYEFF It was not a singular question like that, no. It was very clear that she was doing this project, looking at gender and sexuality, so we all could grow in this area. We all have so much to learn. We started getting into the details of places we could visit, people we could talk with. That was always the lens that we approached it with, and with her too.
DEADLINE You did some traveling!
CHERMAYEFF She and the team had always envisioned it as a global project, which of course was especially challenging during Covid.
DEADLINE In the very first episode you go over very basic terms, like what does it mean to be queer, or pansexual. Why?
CHERMAYEFF We all benefit from re-identifying what we mean by certain words. I don’t think it’s redundant to revisit a lot of terms, especially with gender and identity and how sexuality has shifted over the years. The term queer has gone from a deeply insulting, offensive term and still is for some generations, to something that the younger generation is embracing. The show is meant to be for a wide audience. It’s not meant to assume that you are already somebody who’s exposed to queer culture or necessarily living in an urban metropolis. This is for everybody and this conversation should be had by everybody. We wanted to make sure that it didn’t have too much assumed lingo, which can be kind of off-putting or less inviting for some audiences.
DEADLINE I’m sure you have to expect there’s gonna be some folks out there who are just gonna write this off as quote unquote woke programming.
CHERMAYEFF It’s a part of the cultural moment that we’re in. No matter what you think your kid is being exposed to in conversations at school about sex positivity or gender identity, these are conversations that we are having as a culture every day, no matter what. Ultimately, we are trying to present something that allows for more data points, more information. When you go into a conversation with someone you agree or disagree with .. like, let’s say you are talking about a trans person … you will have some reference. Maybe you’ve learned a little bit more [from this show]. I think we’re trying to get to a place in this conversation where you can have questions or doubts. Maybe you don’t agree with your extremely woke or however you wanna phrase it, open-minded relative, but you can sit at a table and discuss the pros and cons because you picked up some data points that didn’t come from your own lived experience.
DEADLINE The first episode kicks off with Cara, who is bisexual, attending Dinah Shore weekend in Palm Springs. It’s a new experience for her.
CHERMAYEFF That was in our first real shoot together. It worked so beautifully. We all dove in together. I had never been to Dinah Shore and I’m a lifelong lesbian. It was a really powerful experience. I live in New York and I spend a lot of time in L.A. I’m surrounded by queer people all the time. But to have hundreds and hundreds of women who identify as lesbian just celebrating is a really special experience. They aren’t protesting, it’s not about political action. It’s about really having fun.
DEADLINE Can you give me an example of where you felt like you really pushed the envelope with the content here? Are are there stories that you feel like you were able to air that really haven’t been shared widely on television?
CHERMAYEFF Yes. Quite a few. For me, talking about female genitalia or, you know, the vagina, and on such a wide platform was definitely … I’ve never been there! Some of that content has been most surprisingly unseen on mainstream media, in terms what an orgasm is, how it works, or what a clitoris looks like.
ANA VESELIC The thing that made this project really fun for us is because we’re not necessarily filmmakers who are focused on sexuality as one of the topics that we want to primarily work in. So, it was quite a journey for us, too. I think that regular human squirminess around some of these issues comes through. It’s not like we’re approaching this from the perspective of people who are already extremely well versed in these topics. I mean, we learned a lot about how our bodies work, making this show. I also learned there are actually all these scientists studying sex and how valuable that is for the scientific community. We assume, ‘oh, well, that’s just for pharmaceuticals who wanna develop, you know, Viagra.’ There are so many reasons why they’re studying sexuality and gender and sex organs.
DEADLINE Do you think this will mostly appeal to women? I mean, can men get into this?
VESELIC I would sure hope so, especially if they’re having sex with people with vaginas. But I think there’s a broad appeal to it because, besides the specific subject matter, Cara has a winning personality and a sense of humor. There’s an entertainment factor that goes beyond the topics. It’s like watching a good friend of yours go through a series of crazy experiments who is extremely humorous and clever and smart and gung-ho.
DEADLINE You said you talk about female genitalia. Is there an episode breaking down the penis?
CHERMAYEFF I think that they’re hoping for a season two that is more focused on male sexuality.
DEADLINE After you finished the first season, did you have a postmortem with Cara? Did she feel like a different person?
CHERMAYEFF She’s extremely emotive. She was sharing what she was feeling with us the whole time, which was wonderful. One of the amazing things about collaborating with her was how much she’s able to share the emotional rollercoaster of doing this. It was scary and intense to put herself out there in even the most silly moments. She did have real sense of self and boundaries about this. There were certain choices that she made. For example, she wanted to cover her face during a masturbation workshop. Or in this segment in Japan, she was with an artist who makes a sculpture that’s about the shape of her vagina. She sits there and makes a whole sculpture herself. She worked with the team to make sure it wasn’t clear which sculpture was her vagina, because she felt like that was one line she didn’t want to cross — the whole world knowing exactly the shape of her vagina.
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