Lifestyle
Before Hollywood handled sex with care, this lesbian neo-noir focused on authenticity
Corky (Gina Gershon) and Violet (Jennifer Tilly) in Bound.
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Susie Bright still remembers the note she received — on letterhead from the storied Hollywood producer Dino de Laurentiis — in the 1990s. It was from two aspiring film directors who’d loved her book, Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World, and used it as inspiration in a script, which they’d attached. Would Susie, they asked, be willing to make a cameo in their upcoming movie?
The directors behind the letter were Lana and Lilly Wachowski, who would go on to make a little film called The Matrix. But that wasn’t the script they’d sent Susie. What they’d mailed was a bloody neo-noir about a criminal-turned-contractor named Corky who’s hired to fix up an apartment after she’s released from prison. She quickly meets the next door neighbors, a mobster named Caesar and his girlfriend, Violet, who wastes no time in seducing Corky and enlisting her help to swindle a small fortune from the mafia. The movie was called Bound.
Bright says she was flattered by the Wachowskis’ praise and invitation, but she needed to be honest. “I hate to be rude, but the lesbian community is so sick of being twisted by Hollywood and is so defensive of all the garbage that gets put out there,” she remembers writing back. “If I may be so bold, could I be your little helper on creating these characters and these sex scenes? Because I noticed that part’s rather bare on the page.”
The Wachowskis agreed, and so — decades before most productions employed staff dedicated to making sex scenes safe and realistic — Susie Bright took great care in making Bound an authentic lesbian thriller. Since its release in 1996, Bound has been enshrined as a queer cult classic. In June, the film became part of the selective and sought-after Criterion Collection, which praised its “deliciously sapphic spin on a crackerjack caper premise.”
The challenge of casting Bound
Susie Bright wasn’t the only one with initial reservations about the material. In past interviews, the Wachowskis have said they struggled to cast the main roles because so many actresses were hesitant to play queer characters, and some studios even asked about turning Corky’s character into a man.
Gina Gershon, who wound up playing Corky, says her agents advised her against taking the role immediately after playing a bisexual character in Showgirls.
“I read it, and I thought, ‘This is a really great script,” she says. “The woman never gets to be the hero in these stories, you know? The men always get the girl and get the car and get the money. They’re the tough guys, and they win.”
Gina Gershon as Corky in Bound. The Wachowskis have said that casting Corky and her love interest Violet was challenging, and some studios even advised that Corky’s character be re-written as a man.
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Criterion Collection
Gershon says she wanted to play the kind of role usually reserved for leading men like Marlon Brando and Robert Mitchum, so to her team’s dismay, she signed on. And she wasn’t the only one blown away by the character, says Jennifer Tilly, who also read for Corky but ended up being cast as Violet, a Marilyn Monroe-esque, femme fatale seductress.
“All the girls wanted to play Corky,” she says. “I thought, you know why? Because we’re so used to not having power in Hollywood. Violet is an interesting character once you get past the trappings of femininity, which now I see is a sort of a costume that she puts on to move in the male world and get what she wants. It’s an outfit for the male gaze — which is kind of what I do in acting.”
Crafting Bound’s pivotal early sex scene
At its core, Bound is a film about the personas people put on and the secrets they keep from one another. But it’s also a story about two women breaking out of those boxes and falling in love through an intense sexual connection. Bright says that while lesbian films of the 1980s and ‘90s like Go Fish, Desert Hearts and The Hunger focused on romance and beauty, they lacked eroticism and suspense. Bound packed a heavy punch of both. The film’s main sex scene, thoroughly detailed in the script and shot in one continuous take, unfolds in the first 20 minutes of the movie. Bright says that immediacy is essential to the plot.
“These are two women who met in an elevator, sized each other up, got some very big surprises that led them to commit the perfect crime and to trust each other in ways that wouldn’t have happened if this sexual intimacy hadn’t exploded within the first, you know, day of their acquaintance,” she says.
But Bright, Tilly and Gershon all remember dealing with intense scrutiny from the ratings board – in part, they believe, because the scene wasn’t just about sex, it was about a deep emotional connection. They say that in one initial take, Corky and Violet did not appear as exposed as in the version that made the final cut – but because Violet’s hand moved along Corky’s thigh, implying manual stimulation, the shot would’ve earned the film an NC-17 instead of an R rating, Bright and Tilly say. Bright believes that a man’s hand on a woman’s thigh wouldn’t have stirred so much controversy, and says she felt the issue had more to do with the chemistry between the characters than the actual content of the scene.
“The intensity between Jennifer and I was so palpable. You could feel the love these women had. [But] we had to choose a different take where it was much more carnal, much more sexual,” says Gershon. “For some reason, the ratings board is like, ‘Oh no, these women could be f****** each other, but they shouldn’t really be in love.’ That was my takeaway from it. And the scene we had was still really great, but it was an interesting comment about where we were as a society and the rules of American film.” (The Motion Picture Association wouldn’t comment on specific movies.)
How Bound’s place in queer cinema has been redefined
Since its release, Bound’s place in the queer canon has been redefined, says film historian and programmer Elizabeth Purchell. At the time the film debuted, the Wachowskis were known as male directors. Some critics alleged that the film used lesbianism for shock value. Years later, Lana and Lilly Wachowski both came out as trans women. “I think the perception of the film at the time was like, ‘God, these two straight men are making this nasty lesbian movie where we’re the villains,’ to now like, ‘Oh, here’s these two closeted trans women making this hot, lesbian neo-noir,” says Purchell. She thinks the film is now getting the flowers it deserved all along.
At a 2018 screening of Bound, Lana Wachowski explained that she was moved to write the story after leaving a showing of The Silence of the Lambs in tears, frustrated with how LGBTQ+ characters were constantly portrayed as serial killers or basket cases. She wanted to write a film where the queer characters won. In Bound, Violet and Corky are not saints, but no big, bad punishment awaits them. They get away with double-crossing both the mafia and heteronormativity, upending expectations about their relationship and each other. “I wanted it to be shown that femmes are not just pillow queens who lie there and do nothing, and that we are capable of complete loyalty and great understanding,” says Bright.
Caesar (Joe Pantoliano) and Violet (Jennifer Tilly).
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Criterion Collection
Intimacy on screen today
After Bound, Susie Bright thought Hollywood would come knocking at her door to help make sex scenes sexy again. But no calls came, and it’s something Hollywood still struggles with today.
“Everyone is nervous and scared of sex,” laughs Rebekah Wiggins, an actor, filmmaker and intimacy coordinator who’s worked on movies like the 2024 lesbian crime thriller Love Lies Bleeding, which Elizabeth Purchell links closely to Bound’s legacy. Wiggins says it’s still common to receive scripts that describe sexual encounters solely as “two figures make love in the background.” She likes to meet with the actors before filming to really understand how their characters are shaped by their sexuality: what turns them on? What turns them off? How do those factors move the story forward?
“Then from there, [we] build out choreography based on that,” she says. “So you’re giving people the voice and the platform first, rather than coming in and saying, ‘OK, it’s a sex scene. So, you know, three hip thrusts and a side to side wiggle.”
That effort, she says, goes a long way in making the scenes jump off the page; it’s part of what makes Bound still feel fresh today. Susie Bright was not an intimacy coordinator for Bound – she was credited as a technical consultant and helped in a number of ways, including, she says, convincing the Wachowskis to fly real lesbians from San Francisco to L.A. to play extras in a bar scene (where she finally made that highly sought-after cameo they wanted). But both Bright and Wiggins agree on one big thing: crafting sex scenes intentionally is key to making movies.
“If you take the time and you take care to build your erotic scene so it supports the characters and the plot, you’re going to have something that electrifies your audience, and that isn’t a gratuitous joke,” says Bright.
And like Corky and Violet, it opens doors for more characters to be gay, do crime and ride off into the sunset.
Wyle, who spent 11 seasons on ER, returns to the hospital in The Pitt. Now in Season 2, the HBO series has earned praise for its depiction of the medical field. Originally broadcast April 21, 2025.
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After years of avoiding the ER, Noah Wyle feels ‘right at home’ in ‘The Pitt’
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From left: Noah Wyle plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the senior attending physician, and Fiona Dourif plays Dr. Cassie McKay, a third-year resident, in a fictional Pittsburgh emergency department in the HBO Max series The Pitt.
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The first five minutes of the new season of The Pitt instantly capture the state of medicine in the mid-2020s: a hectic emergency department waiting room; a sign warning that aggressive behavior will not be tolerated; a memorial plaque for victims of a mass shooting; and a patient with large Ziploc bags filled to the brink with various supplements and homeopathic remedies.
Scenes from the new installment feel almost too recognizable to many doctors.
The return of the critically acclaimed medical drama streaming on HBO Max offers viewers a surprisingly realistic view of how doctors practice medicine in an age of political division, institutional mistrust and the corporatization of health care.
Each season covers one day in the kinetic, understaffed emergency department of a fictional Pittsburgh hospital, with each episode spanning a single hour of a 15-hour shift. That means there’s no time for romantic plots or far-fetched storylines that typically dominate medical dramas.
Instead, the fast-paced show takes viewers into the real world of the ER, complete with a firehose of medical jargon and the day-to-day struggles of those on the frontlines of the American health care system. It’s a microcosm of medicine — and of a fragmented United States.
Many doctors and health professionals praised season one of the series, and ER docs even invited the show’s star Noah Wyle to their annual conference in September.
So what do doctors think of the new season? As a medical student myself, I appreciated the dig at the “July effect” — the long-held belief that the quality of care decreases in July when newbie doctors start residency — rebranded “first week in July syndrome” by one of the characters.
That insider wink sets the tone for a season that Dr. Alok Patel, a pediatrician at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, says is on point. Patel, who co-hosts the show’s companion podcast, watched the first nine episodes of the new installment and spoke to NPR about his first impressions.
To me, as a medical student, the first few scenes of the new season are pretty striking, and they resemble what modern-day emergency medicine looks and sounds like. From your point of view, how accurate is it?
I’ll say off the bat, when it comes to capturing the full essence of practicing health care — the highs, the lows and the frustrations — The Pitt is by far the most medically accurate show that I think has ever been created. And I’m not the only one to share that opinion. I hear that a lot from my colleagues.
OK, but is every shift really that chaotic?
I mean, obviously, it’s television. And I know a lot of ER doctors who watch the show and are like, “Hey, it’s really good, but not every shift is that crazy.” I’m like, “Come on, relax. It’s TV. You’ve got to take a little bit of liberties.”
As in its last season, The Pitt sheds light on the real — sometimes boring — bureaucratic burdens doctors deal with that often get in the way of good medicine. How does that resonate with real doctors?
There are so many topics that affect patient care that are not glorified. And so The Pitt did this really artful job of inserting these topics with the right characters and the right relatable scenarios. I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a pretty relatable issue in season two with medical bills.
Right. Insurance seems to take center stage at times this season — almost as a character itself — which seems apt for this moment when many Americans are facing a sharp rise in costs. But these mundane — yet heartbreaking — moments don’t usually make their way into medical dramas, right?
I guarantee when people see this, they’re going to nod their head because they know someone who has been affected by a huge hospital bill.
If you’re going to tell a story about an emergency department that is being led by these compassionate health care workers doing everything they can for patients, you’ve got to make sure you insert all of health care into it.
As the characters juggle multiple patients each hour, a familiar motif returns: medical providers grappling with some heavy burdens outside of work.
Yeah, the reality is that if you’re working a busy shift and you have things happening in your personal life, the line between personal life and professional life gets blurred and people have moments.
The Pitt highlights that and it shows that doctors are real people. Nurses are actual human beings. And sometimes things happen, and it spills out into the workplace. It’s time we take a step back and not only recognize it, but also appreciate what people are dealing with.
2025 was another tough year for doctors. Many had to continue to battle misinformation while simultaneously practicing medicine. How does medical misinformation fit into season two?
I wouldn’t say it’s just mistrust of medicine. I mean that theme definitely shows up in The Pitt, but people are also just confused. They don’t know where to get their information from. They don’t know who to trust. They don’t know what the right decision is.
There’s one specific scene in season two that, again, no spoilers here, but involves somebody getting their information from social media. And that again is a very real theme.
In recent years, physical and verbal abuse of healthcare workers has risen, fueling mental health struggles among providers. The Pitt was praised for diving into this reality. Does it return this season?
The new season of The Pitt still has some of that tension between patients and health care professionals — and sometimes it’s completely projected or misdirected. People are frustrated, they get pissed off when they can’t see a doctor in time and they may act out.
The characters who get physically attacked in The Pitt just brush it off. That whole concept of having to suppress this aggression and then the frustration that there’s not enough protection for health care workers, that’s a very real issue.
A new attending physician, Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, joins the cast this season. Sepideh Moafi plays her, and she works closely with the veteran attending physician, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, played by Noah Wyle. What are your — and Robby’s — first impressions of her?
Right off the bat in the first episode, people get to meet this brilliant firecracker. Dr. Al-Hashimi, versus Dr. Robby, almost represents two generations of attending physicians. They’re almost on two sides of this coin, and there’s a little bit of clashing.
Sepideh Moafi, fourth from left, as Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, the new attending physician, huddles with her team around a patient in a fictional Pittsburgh teaching hospital in the HBO Max series The Pitt.
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Part of that clash is her clear-eyed take on artificial intelligence and its role in medicine. And she thinks AI can help doctors document what’s happening with patients — also called charting — right?
Yep, Dr. Al-Hashimi is an advocate for AI tools in the ER because, I swear to God, they make health care workers’ lives more efficient. They make things such as charting faster, which is a theme that shows up in season two.
But then Dr. Robby gives a very interesting rebuttal to the widespread use of AI. The worry is that if we put AI tools everywhere, then all of a sudden, the financial arm of health care would say, “Cool, now you can double how many patients you see. We will not give you any more resources, but with these AI tools, you can generate more money for the system.”
The new installment also continues to touch on the growing corporatization of medicine. In season one we saw how Dr. Robby and his staff were being pushed to see more patients.
Yes, it really helps the audience understand the kind of stressors that people are dealing with while they’re just trying to take care of patients.
In the first season, when Dr. Robby kind of had that back and forth with the hospital administrator, doctors were immediately won over because that is such a big point of frustration — such a massive barrier.
There are so many more themes explored this season. What else should viewers look forward to?
I’m really excited for viewers to dive into the character development. It’s so reflective of how it really goes in residency. So much happens between your first year and second year of residency — not only in terms of your medical skill, but also in terms of your development as a person.
I think what’s also really fascinating is that The Pitt has life lessons buried in every episode. Sometimes you catch it immediately, sometimes it’s at the end, sometimes you catch it when you watch it again.
But it represents so much of humanity because humanity doesn’t get put on hold when you get sick — you just go to the hospital with your full self. And so every episode — every patient scenario — there is a lesson to learn.
Michal Ruprecht is a Stanford Global Health Media Fellow and a fourth-year medical student.
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