Starz already won the battle for the steamiest show of the fall with “Three Women,” its adaptation of Lisa Taddeo’s 2019 nonfiction book of the same name. But even though this drama is filled with sweaty sex and orgasms, viewers may be surprised by the intimate and insightful themes explored on the show.
“There’s so much focus on the female-centric parts of the show, but to me, it’s just a show about human beings doing the best they can under really intense circumstances. That’s just called life,” series star Shailene Woodley told TheWrap.
“It allowed me to have different insights into parts of myself that maybe I was running from,” the actor behind Gia added. “It’s even something [Taddeo] wrote into the script. If you could affect one person and know it made a small difference in their life, you’ve done something beautiful. That would be my intention — that [‘Three Women’] opens up conversations. Maybe people do have a little more fun with each other. Maybe they’re a little more open-minded when it comes to their bodies, more communication.”
“There are just not parts like this out there. It was such an insane gift,” series star Betty Gilpin, who plays the sexually frustrated Lena, told TheWrap. “It’s like if Hamlet were an over-caffeinated deer in the woods who was looking for a vibrator.”
As the title implies, the series revolves around three women at different stages of their lives, all of whom have radically different relationships with their sexualities. Lena (Gilpin) stands as the hopeless romantic who’s trapped in a disappointing marriage and is desperate to have a passionate, loving sex life. Sloane (DeWanda Wise) is an outwardly sexual woman who’s always in charge in the bedroom, and who engages in polyamory alongside her husband. Maggie (Gabrielle Creevy) is a young woman whose first real encounter with romance, love and sex happened with her high school teacher. All are connected by Gia (Shailene Woodley), a writer who becomes obsessed with telling their stories.
The path to “Three Women” premiering on television hasn’t been the picture-perfect fairytale someone like Lena would have wanted. Showtime first acquired the rights to Taddeo’s book in 2019. Though the series was completed in 2023, Showtime opted not to air partially due to the Paramount Global reshuffling happening at the time. Weeks later, Starz swooped in and saved the day.
Taddeo jokingly called the Showtime breakup a “situationship.” Gilpin had another word for it: “heartbreaking.”
“Part of the blessing and curse of doing what you love as a profession is you have to treat it like it’s ‘Hamlet’ while you’re doing it, and then release it to capitalism when you’re done. You can’t control the latter,” Gilpin added.
Before they were even part of the project, Woodley and Gilpin were already fans of Taddeo’s book. Gilpin even called herself “obsessed” and admitted that she and her friends tried to figure out which characters they most related to á la “Sex and the City.” But as anyone who’s even the least bit familiar with the source material knows, a “Three Women” adaptation was going to require a great deal of sex scenes. Not only that, but the success of the series entirely depended on getting these scenes right, both tonally and for the safety of the actors involved.
“We had a phenomenal intimacy coordinator named Claire Warden, who also did fight coordination,” Taddeo told TheWrap. “Everything was about creating comfort so that the stuff that was happening in front of the camera felt like they could do whatever they wanted.”
“Something we really wanted to get inside — pardon — was to really be able to go through the detailed experience of a sexual encounter,” executive producer Laura Eason told TheWrap, emphasizing that the series wanted to portray how “varied” a sexual experience can be.
For the first two episodes, director Louise N.D. Friedberg’s goal was to make these episodes feel like the “raising of hairs on an arm,” Taddeo explained. “We wanted to get granular about the feelings that women feel specifically, and all of the things we’re thinking about because of the patriarchal society that we are still living under. There was a push to really see it from — another pun — the inside out.”
For Wise, she relied heavily on the scripts and Taddeo’s words to help in these intimate scenes. It’s this thorough attention to character that helps make “Three Women” feel so alive.
“It was already in the book. Sloan has more of a baked-in degree of ‘How am I being perceived?’ So there is an element of performance that’s inherent and that also turns her on in those sex scenes,” Wise said. “What a viewer would process as ‘Oh, that’s really distinct’ is just a bunch of nerdy actors and writers being very specific about who these women are.”
“As an acting exercise, [Lena] felt like the ultimate challenge. She is somebody who is incapable of subtext. All her wants and desires are on her sleeve and just turned up to 11. Like there’s no safe way to play her,” Gilpin said. “I was like, ‘I gotta take a big old swing here to do this person justice.’ But that’s part of her desire and her need. It’s just so overwhelming and loud and in-your-face in a way that I’d never really seen before.”
Woodley had a different view on approaching each character’s sexuality. True to the form for the introspective actor, she focused on how beautifully vulnerable sex is.
“I don’t know that we had a brand of sexuality each. I think the beautiful thing about sex in general is that it’s an exploration of who you are and who the other person is,” Woodley said. “If you’re lucky enough to have true intimacy with someone, there’s an exchange that happens in a form of play. It’s almost like sometimes you discover parts of yourself you didn’t know even existed through a sensual or sexual experience.
“That’s what you see with these women,” Woodley continued. “[The characters] all have different layers of self-discovery through the psychological processes that happen because of sex in the show and the way we relate to it.”
“Three Women” premieres Friday. New episodes air on Friday both on Starz and the STARZ app.
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