Gemma Dunn
sitcom which has already drawn comparisons to groundbreaking programmes such as Cucumber and Queer As Folk – explores the differences between dating men and women from the perspective of a person who finds herself doing both. It was an idea that Desiree, who openly identifies as a bisexual woman, conceived when she was completing press for her first movie. “During that period, every time that I did anything, it was ‘Bisexual Iranian-American filmmaker’, ‘Bisexual director’, ‘Bisexual Lena Dunham’,” remembers the star, 34, who co-wrote the script with long-term collaborator, Cecilia Frugiuele.
“And I wondered, ‘Well, it’s technically true, I am bisexual. So why is it such an embarrassing thing? If they’d said, ‘Lesbian Desiree Akhavan’, I would have been like, ‘F*** yeah’. But bisexual? So that was just the thesis statement: why does this make me so uncomfortable?”
The result: a brilliant six-part comedy series for Channel 4, directed by and starring Desiree herself.
The New Yorker plays Leila, who, feeling lost in London having just left a 10-year relationship with girlfriend and business partner Sadie (Maxine Peake), ends up renting a room from neurotic novelist Gabe (Brian Gleeson), an eventual wingman.
But don’t expect ‘will they, won’t they’ vibes.
“Men and women can be friends; I think it’s absurd that every movie tells us otherwise,” insists Desiree.
“Cecilia and I – and all these collaborators – are attracted to the stories you don’t see, something that you can’t anticipate from the first frame.”
But as Desiree discovered, convincing the big-name LA networks to stray from the “norm” hasn’t proved easy. When it came to pitching The Bisexual, she was swiftly rejected by all of the LA networks.
Desiree eventually came to the UK, where she stayed on Cecilia Frugiuele’s couch, co-wrote The Miseducation Of Cameron Post, and set about having her sitcom realised.
When she met producer Naomi de Pear, it was “a stacking Jenga of excitement”, she recalls. “Suddenly, anything was possible and it was exactly the conversation I wanted to be having.”
Relating to the genre, she adds: “It’s important that there’s a gay hand at the wheel. It’s important to me that the people at the helm of a project of any marginalised group that you never see on screen – that the creators and the main creative forces behind it should be peoplerepresentative.”
So she has plenty more stories up her sleeve?
“No. I have nothing,” she confesses, laughing. “I would like to make something really mainstream that touched a wider audience, whatever that means,” she adds with a shrug.
■ The Bisexual starts on Channel 4 on Wednesday, October 10, at 10pm.