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Desiree Akhavan talks “Appropriate Behavior,” “Girls” and her new bisexual TV project

Desiree Akhavan made a hit web series while she was still in school at NYU. The satirical queer series The Slope followed Desiree as she played a “superficial homophobic” bisexual woman in a relationship with her then real-life girlfriend and co-creator Ingrid Jungermann. It was smart, funny and sexy, and it also inspired Desi to write her feature film, Appropriate Behavior.

Desi’s feature premiered at Sundance in 2013 and has since played several film festivals throughout 2014. The story follows Shirin, an Iranian woman who is going through a break-up. She moves out of her girlfriend’s Brooklyn apartment and into a new place with frustrating roommates and a daunting loneliness she can’t escape from. Told through a mix of present day situations and flashbacks into her relationship with Maxine (played perfectly by Rebecca Henderson), Appropriate Behavior is a story about someone you know. Shirin has real problems-she’s struggling with coming out to her Persian parents and finding a job that doesn’t kill her soul. Meanwhile she’s romanticizing her relationship with Maxine in her head, even when memories reveal things weren’t so sweet between them most of the time. She kills time by meeting people on the internet and trying out a threesome with a couple she meets at a bar. Nothing feels exactly right, until it does, and the mix of funny, sweet and sad moments that make up the film are equally enjoyable.

After seeing Appropriate Behavior, Lena Dunham called Desi to come and read for a role on Girls, and Desi will make her debut on the show’s second episode of Season 5 this Sunday on HBO. It’s a big weekend because Appropriate Behavior is available today in select theaters and for download on Amazon, iTunes and other Video-on-Demand services.

We spoke with Desi about the film, her role on Girls and the new bisexual-themed TV series she’s working on.

AfterEllen.com: The movie is finally coming out, which must be very exciting! How are you feeling?

Desiree Akhavan: I’m feeling really good, I’m happy that people are finally seeing it. We premiered over a year now so it’s really good that you can finally download it or go to the theaters and watch it.

AE: I’ve been reading the interviews you’ve done and it seems like people are asking really great questions and moving beyond the easy questions about sexuality and people of color, so a good discussion has been started about the film.

DA: Yeah, I feel like we have been going into territory that I guess was mined in the film slightly, but it’s become a broader conversation about race and sexuality which is very cool.

AE: There’s not a lot of films doing both of those things at the same time. There are films about the queer experience or films about the Iranian experience, but rarely together in one film, if ever. When you were first writing the film, how aware were you that your perspective is something that hadn’t been shown before?

DA: I was very aware because I felt very underrepresented by movies and TV out there.

AE: Has there ever been anything you watched or read where you felt like that person was like you?

DA: So many things speak to me because you don’t have to have the superficial outliers. Muriel’s Wedding spoke to me, High Art spoke to me, the book Adam spoke to me a lot. And those are not stories of bisexual stories. Something is different now. The path has been paved and this story is one that felt so powerful because I had never seen Persians depicted outside of the victims or villains, and now I’m starting to feel the same way about bisexuals, that bisexuality is a punchline and I never see it depicted anywhere beyond, I mean it’s on random TV shows a characters here and there in the periphery, but yeah, I am tired of apologizing for Anne Heche.

AE: [laughs] I wasn’t expecting that, that’s funny! I love it because in the film, Shirin’s bisexuality is presented as matter of fact-this is just who she is, no discussion or celebration of it; it just is. So many times in movies or TV shows, like you were saying, it’s a statement. When you were writing the film, or even when you were shooting, did you ever feel like you had to do something to play up or play down the bisexuality? Because the main relationship is about a breakup with a woman, but then the character is mostly seen relating with men. Did you have a balance you wanted to fill?

DA: I feel like we wanted to put in a very diverse group of people that she found herself drawn to after this breakup. It wasn’t until afterwards that I looked at the film and I realized she had better connections to women than men, and that was not something we did consciously. That just kind of happened. I think a lot of people read into it in a way that I hadn’t intended for it to come across. My ideal intention was for it to look like she was going down the rabbit hole, and losing herself in a lot of ways, from picking up strangers in bars, to picking up people in queer organizational settings, but it was all pointless and meandering because she was still reeling from this break up.

AE: I love the scenes like the sharing of the lesbian bookstore space and things you’d really only have with your same-sex partner. I’m curious what you hear from straight men about the film.

DA: It’s been really funny because most of my positive responses has been from straight middle age men. And I think it’s because of the humor. I think that the majority of queer films that are seen in films about the Middle East, the characters have a lot of “insider-y” information, like taking your medicine. But humor, when you’re able to poke fun of yourself and the world that you belong to, people can relate to that. Making an ass of yourself and being silly. So yeah men have really liked it. I’ve been really surprised: Women, Iranian, queers have found something to be offended by, even though I’ve had a lot of positive responses as well, but the men I have spoken to have been entertained on a superficial level, which makes me happy.

AE: How much of Shirin is also your character from The Slope. They seems very similar to me.

DA: I began writing this script when I was working on the second season of The Slope. It started off this being the character from The Slope. But the more I wrote and rewrote it over the course of the year, it evolved. I think it was about taking that absurd, crazy character from The Slope, which was supposed to be a farce, a little bit like a Portlandia-esq view of my life in Park Slope, and getting two feet on the ground, like grounding them in reality, the Desiree character. And that’s when it became fictional too. I no longer put my name on the character because I thought this is a real person now, not just a joke. That she’s going to have real moments, not just as a walking cliche, but as a human being.

AE: Shirin faces reality in this movie that Desiree doesn’t have to face in The Slope: Finding a job, a purpose in life. Is that something unique to a film that a TV show or web show doesn’t have to have?

DA: I think you could go there in a web series but it would be hard to make a feature film at that level of farce.

AE: I know you’re working on something now, is it a TV project?

DA: Yeah! I went to the Sundance Lab in September with this TV series, a pilot and a breakdown for the season. It’s a bisexual dating comedy, an unidentified woman who comes out of the closet as a bisexual in her 30s and starts dating men for the first time in her life, and kind of loses her community and her best friends and her family and has to rebuild again. Yeah, I’m really excited about it. I think having a bisexual lead character on a TV show that doesn’t take itself seriously and is a comedy in the vain of Seinfeld, and Louis, that’s the kind of content I want to see. Really funny stuff that has a political bend because of the subject matter it tackles.

AE: Would you star in it too, ideally?

DA: Yes.

AE: Are you shopping it to networks?

DA: Yes, I’m currently shopping it. Right now I’m focused on the film and the release of it, but as soon I am done with this process I will begin the process of shopping it.

AE: Also you’re on Girls. Is your character queer-identified at all?

DA: Not that we see. We don’t hear anything about her personal life. She’s very much this perfect student who is a villain of Hannah’s in the writers workshop. It’s mostly this professional competition between them and it doesn’t even go into their personal lives.

AE: How many episodes are you on?

DA: I’m not going to reveal that because it would reveal, it would give away the plot. But I will say that my episodes start Sunday.

AE: Is there anything you learned from the set of Girls that you think you’ll apply to your work going forward?

DA: I learned so much from watching Jenni Konner and Lena work together and how they run their set, it’s an ideal way in a perfect world how I would like to work. It’s funny because I expected on a television series this successful that I would be stepping into a completely foreign land but it had the intimacy and sense of collaboration and fun that you will find on any good independent film set. Yet their resources and the experience level of everyone there was so much greater than I’d ever seen before. I really hope if I were in that position I could be as collaborative, fun, and creative as they are. And watching them work made me want to do television. Watching them work made me instantly feel that it’s the community I’d been looking for. Because that’s the whole point of the movie that I wanted to communicate; these are the people that I care about, outsiders, loners, late bloomers. People who can’t find their community, even the marginalized. When you are queer and you don’t fit into the box of what a hot queer looks like or what a politically correct gay person is, then I felt very alone. When you are Iranian and you’re not this perfectly made up Persian princess, you don’t belong to that. The only time in my life that I have felt that I belong to anything was that when I was creating content. And when I was on that set I felt that way. And this fire under my ass was lit, that I wanted to chase that feeling, I want to create a community the way that they have in terms of collaborators where everyone can bring the best of themselves to the table.

Appropriate Behavior is available on iTunes, Amazon and select theaters.

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