OVEREXPOSURE

FILMING A SHOW ABOUT THE PORN INDUSTRY SURE MAKES A GAL FEEL VULNERABLE.

Emily Meade used to find it really awkward to talk about porn.

“I had a hard time even asking boyfriends about it,” says the 28-year-old actress. “Everyone who knows me knows I have weird sensitivities about porn—that it has never sat right with me how desensitized my generation is to it. So it’s ironic that I’m now in a show where I’ll be eternally connected to it.”

That show is The Deuce, an HBO drama that looks at the pornography industry’s early beginnings in 1970s-era Times Square. It’s produced by the team behind gritty crime drama The Wire, which means viewers are in for a deeply unsexy exploration of the billiondollar business’ backstory. It’s no spoiler to say that misogyny and exploitation are on the cards for Meade’s character, a street worker who ends up in adult films by the first season’s end.

“When I sat down with [creator] David Simon, he made it very clear that he did not want this to be titillating,” says Meade. “Some of these shows on cable that have a lot of nudity verge on arousing, but he was determined to keep it real and show how something that is so coveted is actually stupid.”

That doesn’t mean shooting those scenes was easy, though. One of Meade’s hardest days on set actually ended up involving a nude scene in a porn movie her character is being filmed in. “Toward the end, I have an episode where you see my breasts, I’m having fake intercourse and I just felt really vulnerable and raw,” she explains, noting that this felt different from other sex scenes she has filmed for previous roles. “My character is really disconnected from herself, and that’s how I used to feel when I was younger. Now I’m more connected to my body, and I had a more emotional reaction to it than I expected. I showered and shook it off, but I probably cried later about something stupid, like what I was having for dinner.”