Australian actress Caitlin Stasey, best known for the soap opera Neighbours and for her role on The CW’s historical drama Reign, is adding adult film director to her resume. In a new partnership with the female-focused website, Afterglow, Stasey will be directing pornographic short films focused on female pleasure and empowerment.
“It’s a queer-run and operated company. It’s a very cool group of women making some very good stuff,” Stasey told Women’s Wear Daily. She also explained that it was a very complex endeavor to undergo during a pandemic. “We were all set to make several films in February, but things have gotten really, really dicey out [in LA],” she explained. “Making a regular film during COVID-19 is tough – making a pornographic film during COVID-19? Virtually impossible.”
Videos by PopCulture.com
Stasey also hits mainstream television screens in the new Epix miniseries Bridge and Tunnel from Ed Burns. “[The show] is very visually appealing; it’s beautiful. It has old cars and vintage fashion,” Stasey said. “It doesn’t really combat anything too divisive — it’s just about kids in Long Island.”
Stasey has been outspoken about her feminism in the past, being very involved in the #freethenipple campaign on Instagram and speaking out about the difficulty of being a woman in Hollywood. “A lot of people think that I’m a really angry person,” she told The Guardian in 2015. “‘Do you enjoy anything? Do you like anything? Are you happy about anything?’ Yes, I am! But I don’t tweet about it. People don’t rally in the streets to engage in happiness. People talk about things they’re unsatisfied with.”
Stasey got candid on the Style Like U’s What’s Underneath series, explaining that “people think that beauty opens doors but it opens doors to cliff edges.” Stasey called out the laziness of so many Hollywood filmmakers in how they portray women in their projects. “They know that the quickest way to make a dollar is to objectify, humiliate and mutilate women,” she said. “We like the women that we respect on film or television to resemble the men that we respect, or at least be attractive enough that we forgive them for not being that way. In this town, you constantly have to undermine yourself to appease other people. When people meet you out here they either want to be so impressed by you, I suppose, like they can’t not include you, or find you so neutral that they can imprint on you whatever it is they are already seeing.”
Stasey admitted that representation in the film might not seem pressing in the long run, but that it’s indicative of a larger issue. “It’s part of a wider pool of oppression,” she explained. “It is a trickle-down effect from a systemic and structural issue that betrays all of us.”
