From sex parties to full frontal male nudity & lots of female sex acts – is Dying for Sex even raunchier than Rivals?
DISNEY+ landed itself one of its biggest hits to date in the UK with the launch of Rivals in October last year.
With an all-star cast taking part in naked tennis matches, having sex in aeroplane toilets and a store cupboard in a TV studio, it raised temperatures as well as eyebrows.
But now the streaming service has ramped up the raunch even further with its new series, Dying for Sex.
It stars five-time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams in the central role playing Molly, a terminal cancer patient who ditches her husband of 15 years to go on a sexual odyssey in her final months.
What makes the series even more compelling is that it’s based on a true story, with the real-life Molly recording her adventures in a podcast also called Dying For Sex.
Molly certainly went all in on her quest while dealing with her diagnosis, sleeping with more than 189 men including a Ryan Reynolds lookalike, a mortician wearing clown make-up, and a lover with a foot fetish.
She also explored her own desires by herself, and Michelle, 44, was tasked with depicting those moments on-screen.
In episode two, Molly checks into a swish hotel and after bottling out of taking a hunky man back to her room, fantasises about what they would have done.
She is seen climaxing while humping a pillow, before later using a sex toy and watching porn.
Speaking about the scenes, Michelle told The Guardian: “I’ve done any and all number of sexual situations in my 30-year career, but I’ve never masturbated on film before … and I was nervous.
“It’s much easier to portray mutual desire than just the desire for oneself.
“But God, when Liz [Meriwether] wrote those scenes – when Molly’s alone in the hotel and by the end she’s masturbating to anything, masturbating to a fish in a bowl! – I thought, ‘Oh Liz. You’ve really done it’.”
Another episode sees Molly pleasuring herself in her apartment, only to realise her neighbour – played by comedian Rob Delaney – can hear her and is joining in on the other side of the wall.
She later goes round to his apartment and channels her inner dominatrix as he strips naked and pleasures himself while she belittles him.
But things go awry when he asks her to kick him in his privates, which she does before they both end up on the floor in agony.
Molly also meets another handsome stranger who is into S&M and he goes full frontal in one scene, with Molly impressed by what she sees.
You’ve already done, like, four scenes, and then it’s five o’clock at night and you have to do six masturbation sequences with six sculpted, individual orgasms, and you’re like, ‘Woo! OK!’
Michelle Williams
The show also goes down the same route as the explicit Sex/Life series on Netflix by visiting a sex party.
Molly watches as a man makes a topless woman orgasm in front of the crowd, before she later visits him at the store where he works and asks him to do the same thing to her in the store room.
Michelle said playing Molly had its challenges — not least faking six orgasms in a row.
She said: “You’ve already done, like, four scenes, and then it’s five o’clock at night and you have to do six masturbation sequences with six sculpted, individual orgasms, and you’re like, ‘Woo! OK!’”
Dying for Sex is available on Disney+ from today.