Page 49 - AVN August 2025

“It’s probably the best sex I’ve ever shot,” Mills says. “Everybody was instructed
to be in the moment of excess: Be the character’s memory of the best time they
were under the influence of the addiction. Everybody here is a great performer,
they know how to deliver these fantasies and they also had that mentality going
into it.”
The group therapy scenes drew real reactions from the performers, said Kenna
James: “There were three that put me to tears: Anna, for sure; Reagan, I was a
sobbing puddle; and Puck. I was able to connect to those characters so hard.
I broke down in the middle of the scene. And they were real tears. I was really
touched when Reagan went through her story. After the second or third take, the
tears were very real. I have a picture of me and Puck after we cut, where we’re just
holding each other on the floor, still crying. Just trying to get past that moment...
before we did it again. That visceral feeling... that’s real.”
“The therapy scenes were extremely raw, “ Little Puck says. “I was not prepared
for that level of emotion. I was happy that it happened, but it was definitely
surprising for me, because I had learned my lines, I felt very confident in what I
was going to bring to the table, but everyone else also brought their A game and
it gave me chills. It was a lot. As each woman was relating her story we were all
having our interactions with the other women listening. I would be locking eyes
with another cast mate while someone else was talking. It was a very emotional
two days. It was a safe space to be able to experience raw emotion through
performance. I absolutely loved working on this feature. It was just a really lovely
experience and I feel a lot closer to all my cast mates. It was nice.”
Sarah Arabic tells me she plays “a high school teacher who was caught having
sex with her 18-year-old student. This took a very realistic approach. In my sex
scene, at the end the door opens and I get caught. And that’s why I wind up in
sex-addiction therapy, because she’s kind of delusional. She doesn’t think she
did anything wrong, she thinks she’s in love with the student. In therapy, she just
unravels. Slowly breaks down. It was challenging, because it’s not something
I relate to personally. I had to impersonate someone else rather than draw on
personal experience. Despite the subject matter, I do think the sex scene was
really great. I love the way it was shot. I’m definitely going to be watching it when
it comes out.”
“The scenes where we’re all together were all shot in the same room, in a group
therapy setting, in a circle,” Clouds tells me. “And then our separate scenes were
all together, stylized and separate, all flashbacks. All of our scenes have a color to
them. My color was green.”
“Some of these people I’ve worked with for 10 years,” Mills says. “We’ve done a
lot of stuff together. Going into it I knew that everybody would show up, and really
care about the project, and the material, and their characters. The reason we had
the powerhouse three days of filming that we had was that everybody showed up.
There were no ego battles. It’s an ensemble group and everybody has their role
to play in the ensemble. Everybody brought out the best in each other. It was true
bonding experience. The best thing you can do is put the right people together
and give them a good story. These women kicked ass.”
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