A woman of many parts … Sasha Grey as Chelsea, a high-priced call girl in The Girlfriend Experience, which is screening in competition at the Sydney Film Festival.
The star of Steven Soderbergh's new film came with plenty of experience, writes Chris Lee.
The Oscar-winning writer-director Steven Soderbergh isn't coy about his motive for casting Sasha Grey in his low-budget indie drama The Girlfriend Experience. In a film entirely populated by non-professional actors, who better to portray a $2000-an-hour Manhattan call girl than one of the most prolific and in-demand adult film stars working the so-called San Pornando Valley?
He gave Grey the lead role in the film, which is screening in competition at the Sydney Film Festival, fully intending to milk her X-rated fame for all its worth.
"I was very much counting on the fact that the interest in her would be greater than the interest in the movie," Soderbergh says. "We would be drafting off her notoriety rather than vice versa. I needed her. That's no different than getting Brad Pitt to be in your movie, albeit in a different context."
It probably helps that Grey, 21, can be considered more than just a porn star. The actress - real name Marina Ann Hantzis - is professionally distinguished by her take-no-prisoners attitude toward the hardest of hard-core sex scenes and consensual degradation. Aggressively staking a claim for herself in the industry from almost the moment she turned 18, Grey's porn oeuvre extends to more than 150 films, Sasha Grey's Anatomy, House Of Sex & Domination and Teenage Whores (parts 2 and 3) being among the few titles printable in a newspaper. For her ambitiousness, she took home the Adult Video News Award for female performer of the year in 2008, becoming the youngest person to win.
Grey is also establishing herself as a burgeoning multimedia mogul. She calls herself a "performance artist", is filming a documentary, writing a graphic novel and a "sex philosophy" book and recently launched her own production company with the twin goals of changing the look of pornography and empowering women.
"Part of the reason I got into this business was to change it," Grey says. "I can take my fantasies and ideas, and deliver those to an audience. It's all an extension of who I am."
Dan Miller, the editor-in-chief of adult movie news magazine AVN, explains what separates Grey from her industry's rank and file. "She brings it in her sex scenes," he says. "She means business … Sasha's been able to showcase a way of going about it, a fearlessness, that has resonated with adult critics and made producers take notice. She's in the top 10 in-demand female performers."
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